That Mysterious Noise
by WRTRD
Summary: When Kelly Nieman resurfaces in a homicide case, Kate Beckett's long-held and terrifying suspicion proves true. This story begins during 7x14, but quickly takes a different path. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

Kate remembers the exact moment when it happened, or began to happen. It wasn't an inkling, really, just a slightly uncomfortable feeling. Something was fractionally off. She had written it off to her nervousness about working with the Federal task force and her apprehension about making a relationship work when Castle was in New York. She was digging herself deeper and deeper into that hellhole of a job in Washington and never had time to be with him. Yeah, that was one eminently erasable chapter in the book of her life.

But the little uncomfortable feeling wasn't about her job or the shambles into which it quickly disintegrated, nor was it about being separated from her fiancé. It wasn't about the brief if torturous period of unemployment that followed, either, because once she returned to her old job at the 12th, it got worse. The niggling sensation, the little buzzing in the back of her mind that she couldn't silence, wasn't about any of that. She couldn't take it apart to analyze it. All she came to know, over many months, was that this amoeba-like fear was about Alexis.

Kate and the young woman who is now her step-daughter have a pleasant if not close relationship. Their history is uneven, stained with painful episodes that were rooted in Alexis's invective, accusations that Kate had betrayed her father, or put him in unconscionable danger, lied to him or stomped on his heart. There was, as there always is, fault on both sides, but Kate likes to think that she and Alexis are now affectionately accepting of each other. It is a hard-won peace, but it seems genuine. And yet, and yet.

When Kate began her training in Washington, trapped in the capital's stifling summer weather and the even more suffocating restrictions of her new job, Alexis was in Costa Rica, enrolled in a study program about the rain forest. Castle complained to Kate about how difficult it was to reach his daughter, how they couldn't phone or Skype or email, because she was so deep in the jungle. He was prepared for her to return with photos and stories and mosquito bites; he was thoroughly unprepared for her to bring home a boyfriend. An unshaven, messy, irresponsible boyfriend who was unquestionably exchanging body fluids with her.

Castle, the doting, over-protective father, would almost certainly have objected to any boyfriend whom Alexis brought under his roof, but the key—at least to Kate, the ever-so-slightly questioning but silent Kate—was that this boyfriend, with the dubious name of Pi, arrived unannounced. Uninvited. Unintroduced. Probably unwashed. It had taken Castle two full days to learn the little gnat's last name.

Kate arrived in New York not long after Alexis and Pi. Suddenly she had nothing but time, and she filled it with nothing but anxiety, first about her professional life but then, bit by bit, about her personal one. For the first time in her adult life, she was truly not alone. She all but lived in the loft with Castle, Martha, Alexis and, regrettably, Pi. In addition to all his other un-'s, Pi was undocumented. According to Alexis, he had lost his passport and thus couldn't move on. That was ludicrous: he could have gotten a replacement virtually overnight. Kate couldn't understand why Castle didn't say something, especially because Pi irritated the crap out of him, but she wrote it off as his decision to accept his daughter's choices. Kate had to keep her counsel. Her relationship with Alexis then was fragile, and even a gentle question would be seen as an attack on Alexis's credibility as well as Pi's.

As time went by, Kate's unexpressed worry grew, and focussed excessively on Alexis. She just wasn't the same girl. She looked slightly different, a little puffier, but in her attitudes she was the opposite, steely and unyielding in even the most insignificant discussion. It was one thing not to give Kate an inch, but her father? Kate understood and empathized with adolescent rebellion; it was Alexis's other behavior, or lack of it, that unsettled her. Pi and Alexis were young, and supposedly madly in love. They should have had their hands all over each other, all the time, and yet they barely touched. She and Castle, not Alexis and Pi, were the ones who were caught with their pants down on the living room sofa, more than once. And when Alexis talked about Pi, how smart he was, how committed, there was no passion in her voice. Even when they broke up, without warning, the fracture seemed painless, at least on Alexis's part. No one heard how Pi felt; he simply disappeared. Kate was relieved and grateful when father and daughter patched things up, but she was still wary. And she couldn't say a word. Kate had long ago set the Olympic standard for steel-edged repression—tamp it down, bury it so deep no one will know it's there—and though she had worked hard to be completely open with Castle, this was one concern she wouldn't share. She hid it so well that even he, who was so finely tuned to her moods, didn't suspect that she suspected something.

After Castle was abducted last spring, on his way to their wedding, she and Alexis could have bonded in grief and fear, but they didn't. Not really. Kate was too consumed with finding him, with holding herself together enough to search every day and night, to spend much time with anyone or on anything else. And when Kate expressed her barely-contained rage that Castle had no explanation for why he hadn't been in touch with her for two agonizing months, Alexis flailed at her again. Eventually, they made peace again, and it was holding. Until today.

Today the tiny canker that Kate had picked and picked and picked at, off and on for a year and a half, the little sore that she hidden so skillfully, came blazing to the surface. And just as she could pinpoint when her worry began, she could fix to the second when that worry escalated to full-on panic. She realizes now that there had been an early-warning bell this morning, when she and Castle were having coffee. Alexis was leaving for the library, and on her way out she kissed Castle—and Kate—on the cheek.

"A goodbye kiss? When did that start?" Castle asked.

"Just now. Yeah, no, I'm as surprised as you are," Kate said, though what went through her mind was, "Surprised? Hell, no. Shocked." Before she could give a moment to reflect on Alexis's action and her reaction to it, she got the call: a body drop.

A young woman had been strangled and left in a dumpster, but what first appeared to be a tragic if straightforward case quickly turned into something else. Body doubles were involved, as they had been in that traumatic case last year, and it was clear that Dr. Kelly Nieman was also involved in this one. Kate was already having trouble staying in her skin when Ryan approached her and Captain Gates. "We looked into Kelly Nieman," he said. "She has a surgical clinic in Costa Rica, but she also began seeing patients right here in the city six months ago."

Kate manages to keep the roiling fear at bay as she tells the Captain that she will call on Doctor Nieman herself. After collecting her bag and her wits, she takes the elevator to the garage. Her hands are shaking so badly now that she can barely open the door. She gets in, sits down and places her forehead on the cool steering wheel, fighting to control her breathing. Auden, that Auden poem, that's it. Her mind becomes a meeting place for fire and ice as she remembers a few lines from Auden. How did it go? "Perhaps that mysterious noise at the the back of the brain…" What was the mysterious noise what, what, what? Yes, she has it now: "this Horror starting already to scratch its way in."

Kate is almost convulsing now as she thinks: the Alexis who came back from Costa Rica last year wasn't just different. She wasn't Alexis at all. She was another girl altogether. She was the creation of Kelly Nieman.

The Horror has scratched its way in. Oh, God.

TBC…


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: **The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

**A/N** Time warp! My apologies: In the first chapter I should have said that the previous body-doubles case was 15 months ago and that Alexis came back from Costa Rica a year and a half ago. Apparently my brain is frozen in 2104. It should thaw out eventually.

She is banging her forehead hard and harder on the steering wheel in an odd but regular rhythm—10/4 time, like "Say a Little Prayer," which is exactly what she's doing, saying a little prayer. God help me, God help me, God help me. Her hands are clutched so tightly that they're cramping, but she is so overwhelmed that she's unaware of this external, self-inflicted pain.

"Detective! Detective Beckett! Beckett!" LT, who had been cutting through the garage on his way back from lunch when he saw her, is knocking on the window, but she doesn't react. Afraid that opening the door of her cruiser will freak her, he unclips his flashlight, turns it on and taps it lightly against the hood, aiming the beam at the wall rather than the car's interior. Beckett is keening like an animal caught in a trap. It's a sound he has never heard coming from a human, but she's still not responding, and now he's pretty freaked himself. Just as he decides he should go for help, she turns her head and looks directly at him. She blinks, and blinks again, slowly.

"LT?" She speaks his name like a question, as if she's not sure that she recognizes him.

"Yes, yes, I, oh. Detective Beckett, yes, oh, are you all right?" He's stumbling. He has no rulebook to follow, no clue how to handle the coolest, most controlled person he knows when she is melting down like this. Melting down on police property. In police property.

Beckett stiffens her spine, takes both hands off the wheel and puts them in her lap. She can do this. She can carry it off. She can steady her voice. Rolling the window down with her left hand, she lifts her right, palm out. "Excuse me, LT. I'm so sorry. That was really unprofessional of me and I'm sorry that you saw it. I'm fine, really. I'm fine. It's the case, you know? Just this case. Kelly Nieman. She hit us so close to home before, with Dr. Parish and Espo, and she's back." She shudders softly. "I'm on my way to interview her."

"You sure you're OK?"

"Absolutely. See?" She holds up both hands, and there's not a sign of a tremor, but it has taken everything in her to keep them still. "LT, could I ask you a favor, please?"

"Anything, Detective."

"I'm really embarrassed that I lost it there for a minute. If you wouldn't mind keeping this between us, and not telling anyone upstairs, I'd really appreciate it."

"No problem. You got my word."

She smiles gratefully, turns on the engine, and waits to make sure that he boards the elevator. Giving him a small wave, she drives away. As soon as she's out of sight of the precinct, she pulls the car over until she can control her breathing, calling on every suggestion that Burke ever made to her. She has never been this frightened: not when she watched Castle rip wires from a time bomb or stood on one herself, not any of the times when he or she, separately or together, had stared into the red maw of death. Nothing, they were nothing compared to this. Castle's daughter had gone, and they hadn't even known it. And now her eerie replacement, her manufactured doppelgänger, is here in her place.

It all makes nauseating, flesh-crawling sense now. The defiance, the belligerence that Alexis deployed, everything designed to distance herself from Castle emotionally and physically so that he couldn't track, from day to day, the little things that weren't quite right. The details she didn't remember; the slight shifts in her taste in food and clothes, music and movies; the switch away from pre-med at Columbia. Taken individually, they were insignificant, the typical changes of a young woman wanting to make her own way in the world, to pull away a bit; bundled together, they were something else completely, a paradigm shift. How had she missed it? How had _he_? The reasons stacked up like dirty plates in a sink: because they had been in their own rosy world; because they had been consumed with planning a wedding; because the wedding was sabotaged; because Castle was abducted and she was out of her mind while he was gone. But also because the "new" Alexis, the ersatz Alexis, had been inching back, had grown closer to the original since the spring. She had used her carefully crafted time to observe and absorb and finally to put on, like a beautiful made-to-order coat, a life that was not hers.

What had Kelly Nieman sent her version of Alexis to do? What was she poised to do? Kate, bathed in terror and awash with guilt, had to decide, within minutes, what her short- and medium-range plans were. The long would have to wait. The immediate challenge was not to tip her hand to Nieman but still to confront her about the death of a young woman who was the double of another. Pam Hodges all over again. Her next problem was whom to confide in about Alexis, about her suspicion—no, her certainty—about Alexis. This was far more more brutal, this cut through the heart and through the bone. She cannot tell Castle first, can neither bring him to his knees nor raise him up with false hope if there is not a breath of a chance that his Alexis is still alive. She cannot shatter him before she has determined what destructive path Nieman and this Alexis are taking.

She can't wait any longer: she has to go see Nieman.

Half an hour later, Beckett has returned to her car after an abortive interview with the inhospitable doctor. Beckett had barely begun speaking before Nieman interrupted, claiming that Beckett and Castle had destroyed her career with their baseless accusations, forced her to build her practice again far from the virulent grasp of the NYPD. Within two minutes, Nieman had lawyered up and shown—had her assistant show—Beckett the door.

She's seething. She had wanted to wipe that fucking sneer off Nieman's face, smash her head into one of the ten-thousand dollar mirrors that studded her million-dollar office. But she's back on the street and she has to make a different kind of move, right now. Despite her own convictions, she knows that she has to prove that the fraudulent Alexis is just that, a fake. It's the simplest but probably the most painful thing she'll have to do today. Go home, go to Alexis's room, get a hair off a coat or a sweat or a jacket. That's something she can do. That's a start, something concrete.

"Forgot something, Sam, just have to dash upstairs," Kate says as she rushes past the doorman. Her hands are shaking again as she walks toward the loft, and she has trouble unlocking the front door. Her troubles have just begun: she'd hadn't counted on Martha.

"Hello, darling!" her mother-in-law calls out from her perch on a kitchen stool.

"Oh, Martha! Um, you startled me. I thought you were having costume fittings."

"Well, I was, but they finished ahead of schedule. Everything fit like the proverbial Italian handmade leather glove, if you'll forgive my saying so. So, I decided to come home, have some coffee, catch up on a few things. But what brings you here in the middle of the day?"

Fuck, fuck, fuck. She can't go up to Alexis's room. What possible reason could she give for that? Besides, acting is not her strong suit and Martha would see right through her. She needs a sample, she has to have something for DNA. Shit. Wait, she knows. She pivots to the front hall closet. "Maybe I'm coming down with something, but it just seems much colder out and I was nearby and I thought I'd come get a warmer, uh, coat and scarf." Before Martha can respond, Kate has shed her coat, hung it up, found another and rooted in the closet for one of Alexis's. Thank God. A lone, long red hair is clinging to the back of one. Kate slips an evidence bag out of her pocket and puts the hair in. "Got 'em, Martha. Bye!"

Back in the cruiser, Beckett takes out her phone to call Lanie, but she doesn't trust her voice, is pretty sure that she'll lose it the instant she hears her friend's voice. So she texts. "Can you meet me in 10 out by your loading dock?"

A few moments later, Lanie replies. "What? It's freaking winter. Come to my office."

"Can't. Please, Lanie, be there. And don't say anything. Please."

TBC…

**A/N** Thank you very much for the reviews and follows. It's great to hear from you.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: **The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Lanie is worried about Kate's text. First, her friend's request for silence feels more like a plea. And second, why would a homicide detective who's as unnerved by a morgue as she is by a holding cell full of thugs refuse to come inside? She's about to go out to the loading docks when her phone pings again.

"Can you meet me around the corner at that coffee shop instead? Need you for 5." Kate considers the irony of having chosen that particular place on First Avenue, since no one who works for the OCME would be caught dead there. How the Board of Health allows it to stay in business is one of Manhattan's great if insignificant mysteries. It's worse than a dive, beyond a dump, and no cop would go there, either, which makes it the perfect place for a private conversation.

Guessing that Kate needs more than 5 minutes of her time, Lanie leaves a note on her office door that she'll be back in a quarter of an hour and heads for the rat-trap coffee shop. She finds her friend in the deeply shadowed rear booth, barely holding on to a mug of black coffee and looking like the world's worst candidate for an infusion of caffeine.

"Kate, what's wrong?" Lanie asks, sliding across the plastic-covered bench. "And what the hell happened to your forehead?"

Kate absent-mindedly reaches up and feels a lump the size of a bocce ball. "Oh, it's nothing. I hit the steering wheel."

"What? Were you in an accident?"

"No. I accidentally hit myself on the steering wheel."

"It's a huge hematoma, Kate, let me take a look at—"

"Lanie, please, I need you to listen. Please. And before I start, you have to promise. Promise that what I'm going to say goes no further, at least for now."

"I promise, I do, but you're scaring me a little here."

"Yeah, well, I'm scaring myself a lot." She pauses, and Lanie knows her well enough to wait her out. "Kelly Nieman." A longer pause. "Kelly Nieman." An even longer pause before Kate's voice dips so low that Lanie can hardly hear her. "Alexis." She's trembling so violently that the coffee splashes on the table top.

Lanie covers Kate's hand with her own, and matching her whisper, asks, "Alexis? Look at me, Kate, look right at me, okay?"

Kate stares through the grimy window before turning and looking directly at her. "Nieman took her, Lane. I'm not crazy, I'm not. Before she turned Pam Hodges into you, or Daniel Santos into Espo, she took Alexis. She grabbed her in Costa Rica and made another Alexis and sent that one here with Pi. That's why Alexis seemed so weird at first, it wasn't just that she was pissed at me for the Washington job and at Castle for not telling her about our engagement. The Alexis who's here, who's in the loft with us, that's not the _real _Alexis and I don't know where the hell the real one is, and oh God if she's dead, oh God. I can't—." She stops for a breath and continues, shakily. "And I don't know what this one—the one who Castle thinks is his daughter, but is really Nieman's monster—is going to do."

Lanie is floored, but she also trusts Kate's instincts and experience. "I hear you," she says reassuringly, "but you're going to have to start at the beginning so that I can understand. And then you'll tell me what I can do to help, all right?"

Kate nods, and in a few minutes lays everything out, from her initial unease eighteen months ago to this morning's lightning-bolt revelation that Nieman has a clinic in Costa Rica. She extracts a small evidence bag from her pocket and passes it to Lanie. "I went to the loft and got this hair of fake Alexis's from one of her coats. I need you to run DNA. I don't have anything from the real Alexis for you to compare it to, but Castle's DNA is in the system from when he was abducted last summer. You can compare this to his, can't you? And if there's no match, it's proof that _this_ Alexis is not _our_ Alexis."

"Of course I can. I'll take care of it right now."

"But wait, Lanie, we can't have anyone knowing that you're running this. Is there a way to keep it secret, to code it or something, but still get a rush on it? Please?"

"I'll figure out a way, I'll manage it. We'll have results in the morning."

"Thank you, I can't thank you enough," Kate says, standing up and going over to give Lanie a hug. "I have to go. I've been away too long as it is and people are going to start wondering where I am."

As they part ways at the curb, Lanie puts her hand on Kate's sleeve. "I'm going to guess that you haven't mentioned this to Castle," she says quietly. The tremor that she feels through Kate's thick coat and her own fur-lined glove is confirmation enough. "You have to, Kate. You have to."

"Not now, not today. Tomorrow, if the test says—. I will. But not now." She bows her head and without the strength to look at Lanie turns to get in the car.

Back at the precinct, Beckett applies herself furiously to the case of the young murder victim. She has always excelled at compartmentalizing, and the only compartment that she's permitting herself to open is the one that deals with what's on the murder board. She cannot, will not, think of Alexis. The entire team is working on edge, and at 8 p.m. Captain Gates sends them home.

Beckett may have fooled others, but not her husband. He's not buying her story about how she got the huge bump on her forehead, which is now a livid purple. It's clear to him that the bow-string tautness throughout her body is not just this case and the reappearance of Kelly Nieman and Jerry Tyson. He knows that there is some other force, something else preying on her, but he waits until they sit down to eat before he begins pressing her. He tries, obliquely, to get her to talk, but she's so busy rearranging the food on her plate to make it appear that she has eaten something that she doesn't answer. "Kate," he says sharply. "Kate, what's going on?"

"Nothing, Rick," she snaps. Christ, she can't snap, she can't snap at him, of all people, and especially now. "I'm sorry. It's just, we're just, it's—it's these two fucking sociopaths back in our lives."

"I know, Kate, I know. I understand. I do. But you look as if you're about to shatter." He takes her face in his hands. "You feel like it, too. You're shaking. You feel like you're going to fall apart."

She can't say anything. She can't move or she really will fall apart.

"Kate, sweetheart, listen. Alexis is at the library, but it's late. Why don't I text her, ask her to come home, and bring us all the most disgustingly delicious ice cream she can find at Emack &amp; Bolio's. OK?"

Kate surges up from the table with such force that she knocks her plate to the floor, where it breaks in uncountable pieces. "_No_!" And with her scream still reverberating in the charged air, she runs to the bathroom, locks the door and slides to the tiled floor.

TBC

**A/N** Again, enormous thanks to all the readers, everywhere, especially those who review or follow this story. You make my day.


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

When the plate hits the floor, Rick jerks backward. Leave the plate, forget it, doesn't matter. Is this PTSD? It doesn't feel like her PTSD attacks, none of the same signs. He runs through the loft to the bathroom, struggling with the urge to yank the door open. He stops just outside.

"Kate? Is it all right if I come in?" She's not answering. He turns the knob. Shit. Locked. "Please, Kate, let me in. I'm really worried about you." If only she were crying, he could deal with crying. But not her silence. "Kate, I'm going to sit down here. When you're ready, will you come out? I'll wait. I'll wait for you."

How long has she been in there? It has to be hours. He checks his watch: only seven minutes. That's not _only_. _Only_ would be seven seconds. Seven microseconds. She has shut him out before, but not in a long time, not since those dark days. And never, never has she actually locked him out. Finally, there's the faint noise of the lock disengaging. Telling himself to be calm, he stands up, twists the knob and steps in. Kate is cowering by the sink, crouched against the wall, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her hair hiding her face. He sits down beside her, slowly extends his arm, and circles her wrist with his fingers. Her radius and ulna feel inside so tiny his hand, and her pulse is racing. The sensation is one he has experienced once before, when a sparrow flew in the open kitchen window and he managed to catch it in a dish towel. The bird thrashed frantically, ceaselessly, against the cloth until Rick got down to the street and released it.

He can't release her, though. He can't let go. He skims his hand up her arm, touching her as lightly as possible without giving up contact, until he can wrap his palm around her shoulder and bring her to him. He puts his lips to her temple, where he can also feel her rapid pulse, and that is when she breaks. Great, heaving sobs come up from her deeply bowed chest, so violent that Rick is afraid that she'll choke. Turning himself to face her, he swaddles her in his arms. If it works with a baby, it should work with an adult—and eventually it does. Kate stills, and looks up at him.

"I'm sorry, Castle." She says it straightforwardly, but as if she's reining something in, and he can sense an undercurrent that feels like some strange combination of dread and sorrow.

"Nothing to be sorry about," he says. "But it's so cold on the floor. Would you like to stand up? I can help you stand up." When she gives an almost imperceptible nod he unfolds, bringing her with him. "Do you want to get in bed?"

She shakes her head. "I have to talk."

She has to talk, not we have to talk? Rick holds them both motionless for a moment before he asks, "Shall we go to the sofa?" She nods, this time slightly more emphatically. Spanning her waist with one hand, he guides them into the living room.

"Would you get us some wine, Castle? I could use it."

He's not at all sure that she's making a wise decision, but he's not going to deny her. He goes to the kitchen, gathers up a bottle, a corkscrew and two glasses, and returns to the living room, where he finds her sitting miserably on the edge of the sofa. He puts everything on the coffee table, drops down beside her and gives her what he hopes is a gently reassuring smile.

Kate pulls both legs under her and pivots so that she's at a right angle to him, her knees grazing his left thigh. She looks down, and runs her thumb along his wedding ring. She does it for probably 30 seconds before picking up his left hand and enclosing it in both of hers. "Do you remember when Alexis came back from Costa Rica? With Pi?"

"Of course. Pi, Mr. Papaya Steak. Not a happy episode." He tries to lighten the mood a little. Maybe even, though he hates himself for it, trying to delay her revealing the awful thing that has descended on her. "I can't even walk by Papaya King any more without wincing, and you know how much I love that place." She seems no less miserable, so he adds, "Did you know they filmed a scene of _You've Got Mail_ there? Alexis was about three then. She was a really fussy eater, but she loved the hot dogs at Papaya King. I remember taking her up there one day and they were closed for the filming. She had a fit, yowling in front of the window, and the only way I could get her to stop was to carry her across the street to Häagen-Dazs for ice cream." This little story does not help: Kate looks even more miserable than she had a moment ago.

She squeezes his hand hard, and looks almost pleadingly at him. "Castle, this is going to be incredibly difficult. I'm just going to go right through what I have to tell you without stopping, okay?"

He feels her terror leaching into him, but he is also aware of some nameless new one of his own. It's beginning to crawl up from the base of his spine like an invasive plant, with tendrils uncurling and branching out all over his body. He squeezes her hand in return. "Okay."

"Alexis was so mad at me. I understood it, I did, because she thought I had betrayed you, and because she felt that I had chosen the job over you. I thought that her summer in Costa Rica, away from all the misery that I had caused, would help. That when she saw how hard I was working at our relationship once we were engaged, that she'd soften a little bit. But it was worse."

"She loves you, Kate, you know she—"

Kate puts her fingers on Castle's lips and he shrugs. "Sorry, I'll be quiet."

"When I came back and didn't have a job, I spent most of the day hanging around the loft. That's why I could see how much she was bristling, Castle, not just at me but at you. She was so contrary. It was as if she were deliberately pushing us away as far as possible. I kept telling myself that was a natural thing for a girl her age, especially one who had never rebelled at all, but it didn't sit right. And her relationship with Pi, that didn't sit right, either. Why didn't they look like two kids in love? Why didn't they act like it? Why didn't we wake up in the middle of the night and find out that Pi had left the couch you were making him sleep on and had sneaked back up to her room? The thing is, Castle, so much about her seemed to change. A lot of it was subtle, but it was there. She felt like a different person. I couldn't always pin it down, and I couldn't pin her down. And then she and Pi moved out, and we didn't see much of her for a while and I put it all aside, boxed it up. All my questions and my confusion and my doubts."

Castle puts his right hand up. "Stop, Kate. I don't understand this at all, what you're saying. You thought something was wrong with Alexis, but you didn't say anything to me? Why?"

"Because, Rick, I didn't want to make trouble, not between Alexis and you, not between Alexis and me. And especially, especially not between you and me. But you know what happens when you shove things into a box? I do. I know that better than anyone." And so she opens up the box and tells him what's inside. At one point he recoils, and tries to pull his hand away, but she won't let him. She has to keep him close, right to the end of her story.

"I took a hair from Alexis's new coat today, and I gave it to Lanie. She's going to run the DNA against yours. We'll know in the morning, and if the test results are what I think they will be, that this Alexis isn't the real one, then we'll figure out what to do. We'll get teams to Costa Rica to find our Alexis, because I know she must be there, Rick. I know it. Nieman still needs her."

He wrenches his hand away and stands up. Maybe she had fooled herself, but she had expected him to be momentarily stunned or confused or overcome with grief. He's not. He's filled with rage. Rage at her.

"You think I don't know _my own daughter_? The one I raised from day one, Kate, day one, by myself? Why are you doing this? What the hell is this? This is bullshit. I don't believe any of it. And what I really don't believe is that you were so fucking eaten up with concern about Alexis that you didn't tell me. Not one fucking word. And then you go behind my back and get Lanie to run a DNA test?" He had fisted his hands, but opens one to take the wine bottle by the neck and hurl it across the room. "I am getting the fuck out of here, Kate. And when I come back, don't be here."

TBC

A/N Thank you very much for staying with the story and for staying in touch.


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Castle slams the door with such force that it pops back open. He's having trouble catching his breath and he can't let anyone see him. He takes the elevator to the garage, and once he's there bypasses his car and walks out to the street. He can't drive. He needs a drink, a lot of drinks, in a hideous place. Some pit where the bartender never bothers to wipe any surface clean and no one knows who the hell Richard Castle is. He's not so sure he knows, either.

He's got just the place, if it still exists. If it, like so many other things that he loves in New York, hasn't been torn down. Demolished, trashed, obliterated, flamed, crushed, annihilated, wrecked, plowed under, fucked over, had the living crap beaten out of it. He hails a cab, and mumbles the address to the driver.

Ten minutes later, he's there, in a dim corner of a crumbling block that even the most risk-taking developer won't approach. How the Mighty—shit, if that isn't the perfect name—is unchanged. God, it's the same bartender is the same. Might not have changed his apron since the last time Castle was here, a time he remembers painfully well. It was the day after he caught Meredith in bed with her director. He told Alexis that he had to go out of town but would be back tomorrow, and that her favorite baby sitter would pick her up from nursery school and spend the night with her. He kissed her goodbye when he dropped her off at school, and headed to the bar. It was ten o'clock in the morning. He figured that would give him a few hours to get blind drunk, and just enough more to sober up so that he was presentable and believably cheerful when he went home to his all-but-motherless little girl.

Tonight, he has no self-imposed time limit on drinking. He'll stay til 4 a.m., or whenever last call comes. He doesn't care about sobering up. He doesn't want the best Scotch in the house and there's no good stuff here, anyway. Doesn't want the thinking man's Scotch. Doesn't want to think. It's the worst night of his life, and he wants something to match. He swirls the rotgut in the streaked glass and brings it to his lips. Might as well knock it back in one. Keep 'em coming.

The bartender has his eye on Castle. There aren't many dudes who wander—or storm, this dude had definitely stormed—in here who look like this. Jacket must have set him back at least a grand, never mind the shoes and the $300 haircut. Dude hasn't said a word, just pointed at the bottle to have him leave it there, and most of it's already gone. The poor schmuck is almost unconscious.

That's his cue. "Dude. Buddy. I'm calling it quits on you."

"Nope."

"Sorry, man. You're done."

Before those four words can make the voyage from his ears to his brain, Castle pitches forward onto the bar, his cheek landing on the sticky wood: he's out cold. The bartender comes around and looks for a cell phone. It's in his pocket, and it's not locked. Thank God, or whoever it is who's protecting drunks tonight. Name at the top of the speed-dial list is Kate. Dude's wearing a wedding ring, she must be his wife. Better be his wife.

Kate is still in the loft. She has hardly moved since Castle left and she startles when she hears her phone, his ring tone. Is he calling to make sure that she has gone? That she is somewhere else, licking her wounds? She wants not to answer, but she does. "Rick?" she asks, tentatively.

"Ma'am? It this Kate?"

She almost drops the phone. "Yes. Who's this?"

"Al. The bartender down at How the Mighty. I'm calling for, I guess it's your husband? Tall guy, maybe six two, brown hair, blue eyes? Wearing a gray jacket?"

"Yes, he's—yes. Is he all right?"

"Didn't look too good when he came in here, looks a helluva lot worse now from the way he's been drinking. I told him I hadda pull the plug, and that's when he kinda passed out, but I'm guessing eight hours and a sh— boatload of coffee will bring him back. Sorry, lady, but I need you to come get him. I'm alone down here and I'm not sure I can load him into a cab."

Kate gets the address and tells Al—is that his name, Al?—that she's on her way. When Castle had told her to get out, it had almost destroyed her. Almost, but not quite. His explosion, lacerating as it was, had the strange effect of clearing her head. While he was in the bar, she managed to hang on, managed to realize how badly she had handled telling him, managed to understand why he had reacted as he had. She had been chewing on the frayed edges of this worry for months, and she should have told him a long time ago. When worry turned to dread, and worse, this morning, it was too late. So, when Castle left, she took the charged particles in the air and used them to fire her resolve. She will put him back together, will hold him together, will hold them together, because she has to.

This new laser-cut clarity leads her to make two quick stops on the way to the bar. The first is at their storage room in the basement, where Castle had stowed his wheelchair when he had recovered from his broken knee. She actually smiles when she remembers him saying, "We had some fun in this, Beckett, right? Sex on wheels. I'm not giving this baby away." After stowing it in the trunk of the car, she runs around the corner to their favorite cafe for two very large, spoon-bending-strength coffees and drops them into the cup holders next to her seat. When she pulls up to How the Mighty, she's taken aback by just how bleak a hole-in-the-wall it is. The interior is worse, so dingy that even though the bar is only a few feet away, she can barely make out that it's Castle who is slumped over it.

"Al?" she says, extending her hand to the bartender. "I'm Kate. I'm so sorry about my husband. It's—he's had a terrible day. Please, um, tell me what he owes you."

"Ran a tab, no problem. Gave me two hundred, didn't go through it before, uh," he waves his arm in Castle's direction, "that."

"I hate to ask, especially since you were nice enough to cut him off and to call me, but could you help me carry him out, please? I'm parked right out front." Together they peel Castle off the bar and get him to the car, maneuvering him until he's propped up in the back with his seat belt fastened. Kate locks the door. "I can't thank you enough, Al, really. And again, I'm so sorry. I'm sure that my husband will thank you himself when he's, um. Later. He'll be really embarrassed."

"I've seen plenty worse. Don't worry about it." He gives her a brief wave and goes back to the bar.

On the short drive home, she looks in her rear-view mirror every few seconds to check on Castle, whose chin is resting on his chest. She draws into her slot in the garage and cuts the engine. As quietly as possible, she opens the trunk, unfolds the wheelchair and takes it around to the passenger side of the car. It's going to be tough to handle Castle by herself, since he's dead weight at this point, and she's grateful for all the strength conditioning she has done. A few heaves and near misses later, she has him in the chair and reaches back into the car for their coffees. At the elevator, she gets a break: she and Castle ride straight from the garage to their floor without stopping for anyone else.

Safely inside the loft, she wheels Castle to their room and transfers him to the bed. She has just pulled off his shoes and is working on his socks when she hears a soft moan and, looking up, sees his eyelids open a little. Does he recognize her? Does he know where he is? His eyes close again, and she works off his pants, jacket and shirt before rolling him onto his side of the bed and pulling the covers over him. She has to stay awake, has to be there when he does come to. She flashes back on gut-wrenching memories of her father's benders, of having to make sure that he didn't drown in his own vomit. She'll need both those coffees, the ones that she had bought for Castle and herself before she knew exactly how much booze he had poured down his throat.

Who could blame him? She is struggling against tears, and if that's a battle she's going to lose, she had better do it now, before Castle wakes. And so she allows herself a crying jag, lets herself weep for everything that has happened today, everything that she could have prevented and everything that she couldn't. Eventually she washes her face, changes into a jersey and leggings, and debates getting into bed. Ultimately, she settles in the chair by the bedside, not sure if she's punishing herself or playing it safe. Six hours later she's still there, edgy but alert when Castle opens his eyes and looks into hers.

"Kate?"

She jumps from the chair, kneels on the floor next to him and puts one palm on his cheek.

He's pulling himself up. "I'm going to be sick."

She gets one arm under and around him and bears some of his weight as they stumble to the bathroom, where he throws up every bit of whatever unspeakable bile is left in his system. She runs a cloth under tepid water and is relieved that he lets her wipe off his face and neck. "Do you think you can get up, Castle?" He's not looking at her now, but at least he hasn't pushed her away. She takes his hand, and gets him to his feet. "Do you want to go back to bed?" He shakes his head and turns it to the right. "Do you want to take a shower?" His answer is an almost immeasurable nod.

Still holding him by the hand, she moves them to the shower, leans in and turns on the water. When the temperature and volume feel right, she draws Castle into the glass-and-tile space that seems too clinical and too intimate right now. They're both soaked, and they're both still clothed. Maybe they need to be stripped bare physically as well as metaphorically. She pulls her sodden jersey over her head and tugs off her leggings before reaching out to her stock-still husband and getting him out his boxers. He remains expressionless and she's uncertain what to do. But she craves contact, and she thinks it will be right, the right first step. She closes the space between them, wrapping her arms around his broad back.

To her surprise, he moves his arms, hugs her and begins to rock them very gently, side to side. And then he says, in a cracked whisper, "I'm sorry, Kate. I'm sorry. Help me. You have to help me."

TBC

**A/N** Thank you for your continued support. I am grateful for all of it and for all of you.


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Kate had convinced Rick to get dressed and have some water, toast and coffee, in that order, before they began a long overdue conversation. They sat together on the sofa for more than an hour as she went over again, this time in greater detail, her worries and theories about Alexis, Kelly Nieman and Jerry Tyson, and how they pulled this off. She laid out her case to a grand jury of one; he interrupted her several times with questions, wreathed in anguish and limned in grief, until finally it was too much and he curved in on himself. Kate thought that he looked like an abused animal trying to protect itself against more blows, and she covered his body with her own, waiting until he gradually unfurled within her arms.

"It's time to call Lanie. She'll have the test results now."

"We already know what they'll say." There is utter vanquishment in his voice, complete and overpowering, so that it crowds out everything else. There is no room for hope, no space for fight, and that is what Kate cannot bear. He has already accepted—even without knowing the findings of the DNA analysis—that the young woman whom he had thought was his daughter is a fraud; what is far worse is that he assumes his own child is dead. Kate needs him to regain what had dissolved overnight, as if he had been thrown into an acid bath: his Panglossian optimism, his sunniness. She needs him to be the glass-99-percent-full man whom she has depended on far longer than she has ever acknowledged. She is not at all confident that she can bear, alone, the burden of faith that things can be made right.

Kate holds her husband's hand while she calls Lanie, and listens to what the M.E. tells her. Examination of the hair that Kate had brought in has proved that the enthusiastic redhead, the one who greets Rick with a quick "Love you, Dad" when she dashes in from or back to her Columbia dorm, is not Alexis Castle. She must be someone's daughter, but she is not his. Kate quietly thanks Lanie, says that she'll be in touch soon, and ends the call. Rick is silent; his face is expressionless, a void.

"Castle, now we know for sure. And now, right away, we have to do two things. We have to decide in whom we can confide, who we can trust with this. And we have to start making a plan for finding Alexis. We'll get people on the ground, under the radar, in Costa Rica. Together, we have the resources. We do."

"We won't find her."

"You don't know that."

"I do."

She takes his face in her hands. "No. You have to battle and you have to believe, in equal measure. Think how hard you fought for me, for us, for years. Anyone else would have given me up as a lost cause. _I_ thought I was a lost cause. This is not a lost cause, Castle. I know that Alexis is alive because Nieman and Tyson need her alive. We don't know why they did this, but we will find out, we will bring them down, and we will bring her home. Do you know where I went in my head every single day that you were missing last summer? With every turn of the planet without you? I went back to poetry, to the economical beauty and power of poetry. And then I hung on to one poem, one about hope. You know it, Castle, you used to recite it to me all the time. _Hope is the thing_. Please. _Hope is the thing_—"

He can hear the supplication in her voice, but the response is lodged in throat and it's choking him. Finally he gets it out on a whisper. "_The thing with feathers_."

She smiles. "That's right. _The thing with feathers_, Castle. _The thing with feathers that_—. Can you finish? Please, can you finish?"

He needs a moment. "_That perches in the soul_."

"Yes! _Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul_. I need hope to fly back to you, Castle. I want you to welcome it back, to let it perch in your soul again. That's what you do and who you are, the person with hope. It's one of the things that I've loved most about you from the beginning. My hope isn't strong enough on its own for this. We need your hope, too. All right?" She watches him stir a tiny bit, sees something beginning to awaken in him.

Castle looks at her for a long time, and she won't break eye contact. "Lanie already knows," he says.

"Yes, I had to tell her in order to get her to run the DNA. She did it off the books. No one else knows. We can trust her."

"And the boys, Kate. And the Captain. We can trust them."

"Yes, I agree. But. But now something really hard."

"My mother."

"Yes."

"You don't think we should tell her."

"I don't. Not because she would give it away, she's a terrific actress, she could cover it up—"

"But you think it's one person too many?"

"I think it's one person too many at home. Three of us keeping this awful secret, having to put up the perfect front whenever, uh, whenever—"

"Whenever Al—, this fake Alexis, is at the loft."

"Exactly. And what good does it do Martha to know?"

He pauses for a bit. "Okay."

Kate sees what a struggle this is for him, how extraordinarily painful it is, but she can't let up. "Castle, I have to ask you this. Do you think you'll be able to stay calm when you see, uh, Alexis?" She wonders if there is some other way she can refer to this intruder in their lives. "Not to let on that anything's wrong? Luckily this is a really busy time for her at school, so she won't be around much, but still."

Something changes in the instant before he answers. They both sense it, this subtle but monumental shift, the moment when resolve settles over him. "Yes. I can. Because I owe it to my daughter. I owe it all of us. I can do it."

She hugs him so hard that it knocks the air from two pairs of lungs. "Thank you. Thank you. Now we can start, we can start to find our way back. I love you."

"I love you, too." He smiles for the first time since the previous evening. "And you're right. Alexis is alive. Because if she weren't, I'd know it. I know that I'd know."

"Then let's go. Let's go to the precinct and get going. Are you with me?"

"I'm with you."

TBC

A/N: My great thanks to you continue. And to all the guest reviewers: I'm sorry that I can't respond to you, but please know that I very much appreciate your comments.


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

This meeting was not a tête-à-tête but a circle of five: Gates, Esposito, Ryan, Beckett and Castle, seated around a table in a secure interrogation room at the precinct. After confronting disbelief, and more, from the others, Kate and Rick made their case, eliminating each raised doubt with a cogent response, and finally holding their colleagues in thrall. The group was in agreement about who was involved, and to some extent on what, but was stymied on motive. Why had Tyson and Nieman chosen Alexis and—more important and even more disturbing—why have they left her double in place for such a long time? In every other case, they had killed the doppelgänger within months, when they had no more use for a Pam Hodges or a Daniel Santos or a Susan Watts.

Ultimately it's the unofficial member of the NYPD who comes up with the most credible hypothesis: revenge. Tyson has wanted to ruin Castle since his attempt to frame him for murder had unraveled two and a half years earlier.

"Why didn't he just go after Detective Beckett?" Gates asks. "Surely she was an easier target, especially when she was living on her own that summer in Washington. Couldn't he have taken her out then? He wouldn't have had to involve Nieman at all."

"That's just it, Sir. Beckett was in Washington. I think Tyson believed that since we were no longer working together, not even living in the same city, that we had broken up or that our relationship was strained. But to destroy me by going after my daughter? That's another thing altogether. The logistics were easier, too. Alexis was in a remote part of Costa Rica, and our ability to communicate with each other was practically nonexistent. I wasn't surprised if I didn't speak to her for two weeks or more. And since Nieman has a surgical clinic there, well—"

His voice cracks. He has been stoical until now, and Beckett sees that addressing this new reality again is crushing him. It will be hard to keep him balanced and focused, perhaps far tougher than bringing this to a successful conclusion—please, God, a successful conclusion. She clasps his hand and picks up his narrative. "The first thing we need to do is to establish the identity of the young woman who is passing herself off as Alexis. Her DNA isn't in the system, but I'd be surprised if her fingerprint weren't. Unless her linguistic skills are off the charts, she's American. She's young. Before Nieman got to her, she was probably living on the streets, probably had gotten into trouble with the law. It shouldn't be hard for us to get a fingerprint in the loft, from Alexis's room. I'd like to do it myself, so there's no record of anyone else from the NYPD entering the building, and I'd like to do it as quickly as possible. I could go right now, while Alexis is in class and Martha is at her studio."

Beckett gathers the materials that she needs to lift a print, including powder and fiberglass brushes, and drives home. Her luck holds: this time the loft is empty and she has no need to make an excuse for her mid-day appearance. She silently gives thanks that the housekeeper hasn't been in for three days, as it will make her job easier. Theorizing that Alexis's bathroom is the best place to look, she starts there and almost immediately discovers a complete, unsmudged thumbprint on the mirror above the sink. After retrieving it and cleaning up thoroughly to leave no trace behind, she goes back to the precinct.

The five of them had decided that it was imperative to keep the investigation among themselves. They will run it parallel to the one on Susan Watts's homicide, and they will operate on the quiet. They'll call on Lanie only if necessary, and only with discretion; Ryan, not Tory, will do any tech work. It's he who runs the print from Alexis's mirror. Within minutes he has a number of candidates from AFIS and not long after, the perfect match.

The group has reconvened in the Captain's office, allegedly to review some sensitive material in the Watts case. "The print belongs to Maureen Kelly," Ryan says. "Twenty-one years old, originally from Queens. Three busts on solicitation and a couple of misdemeanor drug charges, all in Miami, but nothing in almost two years. She just fell off the radar."

"More like fell into Kelly Nieman or Jerry Tyson," Esposito says. "They must have made her one hell of an offer."

"Probably didn't take much," Beckett says, "not with the life she'd been living." She looks at Castle, who is staring at the door and hasn't said a word since her return from the loft. "Castle? Are you all right?"

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm just glad we have a name. Maureen. So I can think of her as that, and not Alexis. She can be Maureen in my head now."

"That's true, but we have to be incredibly careful, okay? So no slip-ups, no calling her Maureen even when it's just us, hard as that is, okay?"

He sighs. "Okay. I know."

Beckett isn't altogether sure that he does know, but what she is sure of is that she'll have to keep more than a careful eye on him, keep up the reassurances, stave off the haunted queasiness. And what if rage surface again, pushing him to do something that outweighs the merely dangerous? She takes a steadying breath. "I was more than halfway expecting her to be from Florida, like Hodges and Santos, but it's interesting that she used to live here, maybe grew up here? It would help explain how easily she navigated the city, right from the start. Ryan, can you check DMV, see if she had a New York driver's license?"

Bingo. The photo is five years old, but it's evidence of a strong similarity between Maureen and Alexis: the red hair, pale skin and widely-spaced blue eyes. They are the same height, and share a facial shape. The nose and chin are quite different, but Nieman clearly had no trouble altering those. The license also provides Maureen's old address, and Ryan confirms that her parents still live there. The question is: what to do with that piece of information? If they seek out the Kellys, they risk—well, they risk Alexis. Simple as that. Tyson is too smart to have left the house in Queens alone, not to have installed some kind of surveillance there, to have covered himself for such an eventuality.

They had scratched the idea of interviewing Maureen's family, but their check on a juvie record yielded plenty. Maureen had been a star student, always at the top of her class. Her working-class parents couldn't have afforded to send her to college, but she was exceptionally bright and had been on track for a scholarship at almost any university in the country. Then she hit 15, and her grades tumbled: she was drinking, dabbling in drugs, skipping school, staying out all night. At 16 she got pregnant and had an abortion. Barely hanging on at school, she quit, and her parents, who were by then at the end of a long, frayed and too-often repaired rope, gave up. When Maureen left home on her seventeenth birthday, they made no attempt to stop her. They were dead to one another.

The larger puzzle remains: why is Maureen still here, a full year and a half after she and Pi took up residence in the loft? And what part of all this is, or was, Pi? Was he a facilitator, a distraction, some odd hybrid? Whatever he was, he is long gone. Perhaps, like Daniel Santos, he outlived his usefulness and is dead. For a variety of reasons, including the unvoiced one of a father's desperate hope, both Beckett and Castle are adamant that Alexis is alive. "Tyson isn't done with me yet," he says. They posit that Tyson and Nieman must still need Alexis to provide some kind of information for Maureen, even after so much time. What remains elusive is the most salient point: what is Maureen here to do, or set in play, and why hasn't she done it yet?

Tyson remains out of their grasp; Nieman has lawyered up. It's going to take a lot to pin the Watts murder on them, even with strong circumstantial evidence. Gates puts on a second team for a full-court press, which has the added (and intended) benefit of giving Beckett, Castle, Ryan and Espo some time to strategize on the Maureen-Alexis case. Through a serendipitous dovetailing of strengths and real dedication, they have become top-drawer theory builders, probably the best in the NYPD, and under the right circumstances Beckett and Castle together are an incalculable force. Maybe this is one.

At the end of the day, everyone is spent. Gates sends them home with instructions to relax. As if.

Beckett and Castle spend hours in his office, strategizing, making suggestions, accepting them only to tear them apart and throw them aside. Sometime after midnight, when they finally feel too exhausted to think and are brushing their teeth side-by-side, Castle suddenly stands up. He's almost rigid. Relaxing only enough to spit and rinse out his mouth, he draws the back of his hand across his mouth and turns to his wife. She has seldom seen his eyes as dark as they are, and she feels apprehension slip over her like another skin. "I know what I have to do. I know how to get what we need from Maureen. I'm going to kidnap her."

TBC

**A/N:** Serious thanks to all of you who are along for the ride.


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Kate had anticipated a lot of things, had thought that she was more or less ready for them, but not this. She feels as if each one of her vital organs has moved to the wrong place and she has to regroup internally. As steadily as she can, she puts her toothbrush into the cup on the sink. She'd rather talk to him while looking in the mirror, as if that indirect way of conversing would be easier, but she know that it's cowardly. She turns to face him, takes his right hand in her left and spreads her other across his chest.

"Castle," she says quietly, feeling his heart battering her palm. "You can't kidnap Maureen."

"Why not? I can get every piece of information that those fucking people drilled into her. I will get her to tell me every single thing they did to her and to Alexis, and why. I—"

"Stop, please stop, Castle. This won't work."

"I'm a writer, remember? One of the things that I do best is to get inside people's heads, including psychopaths like Tyson. Regrettably I've gotten to know him pretty well by now, and I can get inside Maureen's head, too. I don't know what her story is, but I'll get it out of her. This is what I excel at it, and this time I'm absolutely balls to the wall."

"Maybe you can do this, but another way, one that's...less."

"Less what?"

"Less dangerous. Less illegal."

"Such as?"

Perhaps it's because they've been thrashing out the case for hours, or because the monster had set up shop in her brain quite a while before that, but she's oddly relaxed as she stands in the bathroom in nothing but a T shirt. Her feet are literally cold, but not metaphorically. She feels brave. She has come up with an alternative plan, on the spot. She'll plant the seed, see if it takes root. There's enough of Castle in it that it just might. "Take her to the Hamptons, tell her it's about her birthday."

He shakes his head in confusion. "What?"

"You've been talking to me about ideas for celebrating Alexis's 21st birthday next month, so what about this? Ask Maureen if she's free this weekend, and if she's not, wheedle her into canceling whatever she was going to do. That's definitely something you excel at, wheedling. Tell her that you have a mind-boggling Father-Daughter Castle Adventure waiting in the Hamptons for the two of you, before she's officially an adult and you're the only kid left in the equation. You can say that I'll join you Sunday afternoon, if you want. I'm sure that you've already got a plan for confronting her, blindsiding her, whatever, but what if you did it in the safe room in the Hamptons? It's soundproof. Even if someone came to the house, they wouldn't hear you talking, and no one knows it's there but the family. Do you think you can break her in 24 hours?"

She can tell that he's considering her suggestion, weighing it, turning it over. He looks down at the floor, not at her, and clenches and unclenches his left fist.

"Okay," he says at last. "Yes."

Before he can say any more, she moves her fingers to his lips. "Castle, listen. Most of me wants to know what you intend to do and how you're going to do it, in fact all of me wants to know, but you mustn't tell me. I need, excuse me for saying this, 'plausible deniability.' If anyone on our team—Espo, Ryan, Gates—asks where you are, I'll just say that you wanted to go to the Hamptons by yourself, to clear your head. They all understand how difficult this situation is for you, and it sounds reasonable. I hate lying to them, but I will if I have to."

"What about my mother? She'll wonder why you're home but I'm not. What can we possibly tell her?"

"She and some of her acting students are going to that three-day workshop in Cambridge, remember? She'll be away and won't even know you're not in the city."

"You're right, I'd forgotten."

"So, it's settled, then? And we can go to bed now?"

He smiles tentatively, nods his head, and leads her out of the bathroom.

Two days later, the bad news is that the Susan Watts investigation has all but stalled, even with detectives double teaming it. The marginally good news, or potentially good news, is that Maureen has agreed to go to the Hamptons with Castle. He managed to arrange everything in a series of texts, rather than phone calls or face-to-face chats, which made it easier for him to keep his emotions under control, and he told her that he'd pick her up outside her dorm.

He has chosen to leave on Friday evening, rather than in the afternoon, on the theory that Maureen will be apt to snooze in the car if they're driving in the dark, and he won't have to keep up a conversation. At eight o'clock he pulls the car to the curb on West 111th Street, where she's waiting for him.

"Wow, Dad, I didn't think you'd be driving this," she says, as she gets in and buckles up.

"Nothing says father-daughter fun like a Ferrari," he says as irrepressibly as he can, steeling himself as he gives her a smile and a quick kiss on the cheek. "You can drive it back on Sunday, and I'll take it easy."

"Right, Dad, like you ever take it easy when I'm at the wheel of your baby."

"_You're_ my baby, Alexis, at least until April 20th, when you will officially be a full-grown woman. Unless you choose to remain a child like me, which I sincerely doubt." He fleetingly wonders if he's laying it on too thick.

They chat aimlessly until they get on the Long Island Expressway. If it were summer, they'd be creeping along on what's known as the world's longest parking lot, but on a bitterly cold winter night the traffic is very light and Castle picks up speed. As he had predicted, Maureen has fallen fast asleep. She stays that way until they reach the house, and he nudges her awake. Once they're inside, he heads for the kitchen.

"I'm making us hot chocolate with extra whipped cream," he calls out, "to warm us and knock us out, I hope." While Maureen is taking her things upstairs, he removes a small Ziploc bag from his pocket and pours its contents—one and a half finely crushed Ambien tablets—into her mug. He's done a test run, and is confident that the chocolate and sugar will disguise the taste of the sleeping pills. By the time she joins him in the kitchen, the hot chocolate is ready and he hands over hers. He ponders the not-insignificant irony of drinking his from the WORLD'S GREATEST DAD mug that Alexis had given him for father's day when she was eight.

"So, Dad, what are we doing tomorrow, other than recovering from sugar shock?"

"Are you kidding? No way I'm telling you. The secrets of our last parent-child bonding weekend will remain a secret until you wake up, and even then will be revealed only incrementally. The better to savor it, as I am this drink." He smacks his lips noisily, the better to cover what he thinks must be his audible heartbeat, and places his mug on the counter. "And I'm done. Time for bed. Must have strength for tomorrow."

"I'm off to bed, too, Dad." She puts her mug in the sink, hugs him briefly and heads for the stairs. "Night."

"Night," he answers after a beat but before rinsing both mugs thoroughly and putting them in the dishwasher. He's surprised at how relatively calm he is, and grateful that he has inherited enough of his mother's acting ability to have successfully concealed his rage.

In the master suite he undresses, brushes his teeth, and sets the alarm on his phone for 2 a.m. He's not sure that he'll be able to sleep at all, given what lies ahead, but he does in fact nap intermittently over the next three hours. At two o'clock he dresses again, picks up a duffel bag that he packed before going to bed, and makes his way to the safe room in the basement, punching in the code and swinging the door open. He double checks that everything he might need is there, including a good supply of bottled water and blankets and an array of batteries, and makes sure that the security cameras and landline are functioning.

Walking as quietly as possible, he goes to Maureen's room. He knows that she keeps her cell in her purse, which she has hung on the back of the chair next to the door. He picks it up and takes it the adjoining guest room, where he removes and pockets the phone's SIM card. After putting the cell back, he returns to Maureen's room, leaves her purse on the chair, and tiptoes to her. Gently pulling away the bedding, he leans over and scoops up the sleeping creature whose days under his roof are, if all goes well, about to end. He thinks that he has never called on God as seriously as he is right now.

Castle carries her downstairs and across most of the ground floor to the basement stairs. They're a little tricky, but he gets down without dropping her, and when he places her on the safe-room sofa, she stirs only slightly. He knows that she'll sleep for some time, but he's far too wary to nap now. Instead, he goes over and over and over exactly what he will say to her.

After what seems an interminable amount of time but is actually only six more hours, he sees Maureen open her eyes. She looks groggy until she registers where she is, and pulls herself up. Her voice is shaky when she speaks to Castle, who is sitting on a chair just a few feet away.

"Dad? Are we in the safe room? What happened?"

His eyes are like flint. He has to call on every molecule of self-control that he possesses not to reach out and slap her across the face, preferably across the room. "What happened? You tell me, Maureen."

TBC

**A/N:** I promise: no waterboarding! No physical torture at all.


	9. Chapter 9

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

The velocity of an electron renders it invisible, but as Castle sits in the hard-back chair he's sure that he sees millions of the subatomic particles, unleashed and caroming off the walls. And suddenly he feels as if he's surrounded by lightning, the kind that Zeus—the sometimes vengeful Zeus—hurled across the sky. Castle almost puts his hand on the top of his head to check if his hair is standing on end. And yet he is, while not serene, perfectly balanced and completely in control as he stares down his make-believe daughter.

She's staring back, but in three and a half seconds, the moment between two blinks of an eye, she realizes that the game is almost certainly up. Part of her is surprised that it hadn't happened earlier, despite how hard she has worked, how careful she has been, all the bullshit that she's endured. She had warned those lunatics that they'd left her too long, had told them to hurry up. The game may be almost up, but she's still in it. She still has some moves, and she's holding the ultimate chip: Alexis's whereabouts.

"It's a long story. Rick."

"I'm sure it is, Maureen. I'm a storyteller myself." He's waiting, and he senses that she is. He may appear to have the patience of a two-year-old, but when pressed he can outlast anything and anyone. She'll never beat him at this.

She needs to buy some time to figure out how to manipulate him. It dawns on her that she has played the role of Alexis for so long, gotten so comfortable in it, enjoying the perks, that she's rusty on being the street-smart Maureen. She doesn't move from the sofa as she looks up at him and asks matter-of-factly, "Where shall I start?"

"Ordinarily I'd say at the beginning, but there's nothing ordinary about this. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to summarize the first, oh, ten chapters of your story, help move things along. How you grew up in Queens, no money, always the good girl. You got every merit badge the Girl Scouts offered. You were always first in your class. Best at everything, every subject, nose to the grindstone. Right on track for a college scholarship. Oh, your parents were going to be so proud. Our little girl, look at her, an Ivy Leaguer."

"You don't—"

Standing now, he briefly puts a hand up to silence her before placing it lightly on the chair back. His eyes haven't moved from her face. He looks both utterly relaxed and ready to pounce. "No interruptions, Maureen. Where are your manners, hmm? Did you ditch them along with everything else? Throw them on the tracks of the R train? So, back to your story. Everything was going fine, until it wasn't. Until boys happened. Boys didn't care about your straight A's, did they? In fact, all those straight A's really got in the way. It crept up on you, didn't it? One day you went to school and everything had changed. Boobs trumped brains, and you didn't have any skin in this new game."

He's always been good at reading people, but working with Beckett for six years has made him a pro at picking up tells. He sees the miniscule twitch in Maureen's eye, the slight lowering of the lid. "Skin's kind of the operative word here, isn't it? You started to show a little skin. You've always been a quick study, but this time you were a little too quick, because you got in too deep too fast. You had to be the queen of the bad girls, didn't you. Maybe it started with you giving the cutest boy in the class a blow job behind the gym."

He sees her eyes widen. "Oh, please, don't try the little shocked look on me. It's not gonna work. Then the boys wanted a lot more, but because you'd been such a good girl up until then, you were still uncomfortable. Inexperienced. But since you were smart and resourceful, you figured that everything would go down easier—yes, you'll have to indulge me in a bit of wordplay, _Maureen_—with a little booze. Or a little E or tweak or cat valium, whatever you could get your hands on. And then what? Then it was too late. Everything was shot to hell. Kiss that college scholarship goodbye. The only A you could get by then was as a fuck-up. And you couldn't see any way out, because when you're 14 or 15 or 16, everything seems so final. Carved in stone. No exit. So you left home, went as far as you could on the money you had, where you thought that you could do OK on the hustle, Miami."

Bending over to reach under the chair, Castle picks up a bottle of water, unscrews the cap and takes a long swig. He'll give her credit, she's holding up pretty well in all this, looks pretty steady. "I'd offer you some of this, but I'm the one who has been doing the talking, so I'm the one who needs it." He's silent for a few minutes. She doesn't expect that from him, Mr. Motor Mouth, and he can see her ever so slightly squirm. Good. He drinks some more water, stretches, and then sits down.

"It wasn't so easy in Miami. A lot tougher than Queens. Lots of competition on the street, lots of danger. Marginal living like that was grim. Bleak. Degrading. And then one day you and Jerry Tyson and Kelly Nieman got together. They found you, you found them, doesn't really matter. They'd done this before. And then they made you one hell of an offer. Fill in for this rich kid in New York. We'll help you. We'll give you everything you need to pull it off, and you'll have everything you ever want. OK, so you'd have to have a little plastic surgery, do some studying. What's that against the life you'd lead as Alexis Castle? You'd blown your chance for college, for a great college, but you have a good brain and they knew it. They were handing you Columbia on a platter."

He moves around in the chair, spreading his legs slightly and resting his palms on his knees. It makes him appear to be letting his guard down a bit. In fact, he's doing it to steady his nerves. The closer he gets to the point in his narrative where Alexis and Maureen intersect, where Maureen begins her transformation and assumes, presumes, subsumes, consumes everything that is his daughter—everything but the soul of his daughter—the tougher it is to hold himself together.

"So, I'm taking a little break here. Humor me for a minute. How did you learn everything you needed to? I know"—he knows no such thing, but it's a good guess—"that you shared a room with Alexis, but there's no way that you picked all of it from her memory bank. And when I said humor me for a minute, I meant it. You've got a minute."

Maureen draws herself up, quickly running through what she can reveal at this point. She's not sucking up to him, that'll do her no good. Give him some information, but with edge. Her specialty. It's kept her alive. "It wasn't hard. Some loser with a double-digit IQ could've gotten the basics. Jesus, you're such a helicopter parent. You documented every damn burp, word, step, misstep, school project, recital, cold, field trip, dance like she was the first fucking kid on Earth. I nearly lost my mind looking at the videos and scrapbooks. And then all of Alexis's diaries and journals that Tyson got out of the loft when you were out here in the Hamptons feeling sorry for yourself because Kate was in Washington without you, boo hoo. Not to mention Alexis. She's a little gold mine, and she's smart enough not to tell me something that's not true."

Castle thought that he'd been fully alert before, but something more is stirring. First, Maureen is referring to Alexis in the present tense and second, she said that Alexis wouldn't feed her any misinformation. He decides to risk something on one question. "Oh, yeah? Why is that?"

"Because Tyson told her if she did, he'd kill her grandmother, slowly, right in front of her. And he'd have fun doing it."

TBC

**A/N** Thanks again for supporting me in my hours of angst!


	10. Chapter 10

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Castle had never really understood the concept of killing the messenger until this moment. He wants to choke the life out of Maureen, wants to hear her beseech a God she might have believed in once and is counting on now, wants to feel her last, desperate, unforgiven breath move under his fingers. Instead, he uses his hands to put a death grip on his thighs. "I'm not surprised," he says coolly, though in truth that particular threat—torturing Martha to extract information from Alexis—hadn't occurred to him. Perhaps it should have, but there are only so many rooms in Hell that he will allow his imagination to visit at one time.

He pulls the duffel bag toward him with his foot, grabs an energy bar, unwraps it and takes a sizable bite. "Mmm. This is really good. Alexis loves these. She'd sell her soul for one when she was pulling an all-nighter before an exam." He stops to lick a dab of peanut butter from his thumb. "You sold your soul for something else, of course." He takes another bite, and chews slowly. "But I digress. Still, that reminds me: before we get back on the main road, I'm going to take a little detour." He rubs his lips together, crumples up the energy-bar wrapper and tosses it back into the duffle bag. "Pi."

The mention of the fruitarian's name elicits a small shudder of disgust from Maureen.

Castle makes a quick assessment: should he bring Kate into the narrative now? And is it time for a bit of prevarication? "You couldn't stand him, could you? He was a distraction, to draw my attention away from you and onto him while you got used to your new role. He was such a fucking irritant, wasn't he? Didn't you just want to swat him? I used to call him the fruit fly." He smiles icily, takes another swig of water. He can see that he's really under her skin now. "But your so-called relationship with Pi is where your prep work fell short. Kate noticed it right away, that there was no passion between the two of you. Zero, zip, zilch. That's what she said. Too bad you never got acting lessons from my mother, you might have made a better show of it. There was no manual for working with Pi—and it was work, I know—not like all the primary and secondary source material you had for playing Alexis. Yeah, Kate was on to you _fast_."

It's apparent to him that the mention of Kate has alarmed Maureen. She's tough, but not tough enough. Not any more. The soft life has softened her, thrown off her timing, too. He's going to let her stew over how long he has known, what he might have set in motion while she thought she was free and clear. He stands up. "I'm going out." And he turns, duffel bag in hand, and walks through the door, leaving her to hear nothing but the sound of the locks engaging and the breathing that is far too labored for someone who's only 20.

Back in the main part of the house, Castle struggles a bit, too. He's running a race of unknown length for which he has had virtually no training time. He inhales slowly and deeply. Getting out of that claustrophobic room for even a few minute is helping, and he reminds himself that he has always been able to think fast on his feet. He has linked the security system to his phone so that he can keep an eye on Maureen, figures she'll be looking for the landline soon. What are the chances that she has memorized Nieman's and Tyson's cell numbers? She must have them, have some way to reach them. It's the primary reason that he took the SIM card from her phone. He watches her sitting on the sofa and he's pleased that she looks nervous as all hell—maybe even on the precipice of scared. Once she starts moving, he'll move, too—right back to the safe room. Seven minutes later, she rises from the sofa; twenty seconds after that, Castle opens the door.

"Stretching your legs?" he asks. "Time for you to sit back down." She tries to give him a challenging look, but doesn't go the distance. She returns to the sofa, he, to the chair.

"I occasionally, but only occasionally, speculate about Pi, what his story really was, what happened to him. Don't care, but I'm mildly curious. How about you fill me in."

"Why not? You can't put anything on me. I hated the little asshole, he made my skin crawl. I was ecstatic when you made him sleep on the sofa, you know? He was a small-time dealer in Miami, made the mistake of holding out on someone higher up the food chain. I didn't give a shit, so I basically ignored him when he bitched about it. I just know that he owed Tyson big time, which is why he went along with this Alexis-and-her-boyfriend plan. He thought that it would over and out. Yeah, well, surprise. When we moved into that disgusting apartment he tried to cross Tyson and that was it. I came back from class one day and, poof, he was gone. Who knows where, but I can guarantee he's nowhere pretty. In fact, I can guarantee that he's nowhere at all, at least not with a pulse." She gives a little snort, followed by a barely audible chuckle. "Outlived his welcome."

Castle gives her—and himself—a moment. He flexes his fingers, cracks his neck.

"So, what's in it for you, Maureen, over the long haul?" He can see that she hadn't expected that. There's a suggestion of sweat at her hairline. "You couldn't have stood this forever, could you? It's as simple as this: you're not Alexis. Despite the ways that you've adjusted her life to make it more comfortable for you, to accommodate you—changing majors, for instance—you hate it and you hate her. You were the bridge-and-tunnel girl, she was the entitled kid in SoHo with the rich daddy. You hated that she had what you didn't, but then you had to pretend to be her, for months on end—hell, more than a year—and it's too confining. You want to bust out, but you can taste that degree, that Columbia B.A. that will open doors, and you need to hang in for 15 months more. But you're smart, and you've come to know that you couldn't have gotten away with it forever, either. You've suspected that outsmarting Tyson, Nieman and yes, I immodestly add my own name here, is not as easy you thought it would be when those two set you up. And believe me, they've set you up."

"Don't be so sure," she says, as a tsunami of uncertainty approaches.

"Don't be so sure? Sure of what? That they've set you up? Oh, I am."

"About Alexis."

"Oh, I'm sure about her, too. I'm sure that she's alive." He's going to wait her out again.

"About me, either."

"Maureen, I haven't any doubt about you. None. You're venal, you have absolutely no scruples, and you're scrambling. And here's your plan: sell to the highest bidder. You're assuming that's me, that I'll pay you anything to tell me where Alexis is."

"You got it, Rick."

"But you don't." He hoists the duffle bag to his waist and shakes it lightly. "Have you given any thought to what I have in here?"

TBC

**A/N: **Thank you for all the great feedback. And I promise: there no instruments of torture in the bag!


	11. Chapter 11

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Beckett feels wraiths weaving around her arms and legs, pinning her down, senses apparitions circling her chest and stealing her breath as she sits in front of the fire. She's dressed in a turtleneck and heavy sweater, leggings, sweat pants, woolen socks and shearling-lined slippers, and she's wrapped in a quilt, yet she's still cold. Eyes open or eyes closed, she sees the ghosts of every woman whom Jerry Tyson has murdered, every victim of Kelly Nieman. Maybe she was crazy to have suggested to Castle that he spirit Maureen away to the Hamptons and talk with her in the safe room. She knows that she couldn't have stopped him from going after the girl, so she's trying her hard to accept her part in this, to accept her plan as, if nothing else, the lesser evil.

Her husband is not a man given to violence, except when he is, when he believes that he must be. He beat the shit out of Douglas Stevens after Alexis was kidnapped two years ago, and she recalls verbatim his response when she asked him what he had done. "I appealed to his humanity." It's her day off, and early afternoon now. She should be doing something, anything, anything but this nothing. All she wants to do is to talk to Castle, and it's the one thing she cannot do. She can't call him, or text. Can't email or tweet or hire a plane to skywrite a message above the house. She can't get in the car and drive 90 miles to the Hamptons like a woman possessed, even if she is a woman possessed. And so she waits, and she's cold, maybe as cold as she has ever been.

Sitting in the safe room, Castle is holding the duffel. Maureen can barely swallow. Holy Mother of God, what's he got in that bag? He had shaken it with a little flourish, and that's what really terrifies her. He's usually an even-tempered guy, but she has seen cold, ugly flashes of something deep inside him. Alexis had told her what he'd done when she had been kidnapped, and she's thinking now that those details were delivered not just for background but as a warning: cross my dad at your own peril. Maureen wonders if this room is her own hell, since it's the place where she is fast abandoning hope.

Castle places the bag on his lap. He's grateful for his years of playing poker, since they're what made possible the expression he is wearing now: completely unreadability. He unzips the bag matter-of-factly, dips his left hand inside and pulls out a piece of rope, about six feet long. "Know what this is?" he asks, holding it aloft.

"Rope."

"Right. Describe it to me."

"It's green and white."

"What else?"

"It looks like nylon."

"Doesn't look familiar to you?" He shakes it a little and it moves like a snake.

"No."

"Huh. I'm surprised you never saw anything like this around the house, wherever Tyson was stashing you. It might have been in a workroom, or on a closet shelf, maybe the garage. Or the basement. It's easy to miss things in a basement. Not enough light, usually." He sees her fighting to swallow. Good. "Jerry loves this particular kind of rope. It's twisted—no small irony there, right? Twisted quarter-inch rope. It's lightweight, waterproof and really strong, which means that it ideal's for use as a simple garrote. It's the perfect weapon, cheap and universally available. You don't need a license or operating instructions. It's silent."

Castle replaces the bag on the floor, but keeps the rope. He wraps an end twice around each hand, snaps the rope taut and then lets it go slack. "I think I know why this has a particular appeal to Jerry, why it's his weapon of choice. When he kills a woman with this, and he has killed a lot women"—Castle tightens the rope again—"he controls the rate at which she dies. He can tease her with it, let her think she can bargain her way out as she chokes on a string of promises. He can watch the life go out of her as she struggles uselessly against him. Or he can snap her neck fast, be done with her as quickly and efficiently as a ferret is with a rat. I imagine that he likes all the choices he has, but I'd put most of my money on the first. What do you think?"

Maureen does not reply.

"You're sure you never saw rope like this when you were hanging out with Jerry? You'll have to forgive the bad pun and the gallows humor, but I haven't had much to laugh about the last few days. Nothing? You've nothing to say? You think there are other things in my bag of tricks, or is the rope all I need?" He puts his hand back in the bag and extracts a manila folder. "Before I go any further, I want to show you something. It's my own little version of show and tell, something I'm sure you remember from kindergarten." He opens the folder, leafs through its contents, and then closes it. "These are not suitable things to show five-year-old, but I'm sure that you'll find them educational. Instructive. Informative." He opens the folder again, picks out an eight-by-eleven photograph, and studies it.

"You know Lanie Parish."

"What?" Maureen can barely formulate a thought, never mind a word.

"Lanie. Dr. Parish. The medical examiner. Kate's best friend. You've seen her at the loft a few times, parties. Beautiful woman. I know you know her."

"Sure." Maureen's eyes are so wide open she looks almost exophthalmic.

"Then you'll appreciate this photograph." He hands her a lurid picture of the late Pam Hodges, taken while she was on a slab in the morgue. The lighting makes the ligature marks around her neck especially vivid.

Maureen chokes and puts her hand over her mouth.

"I hope you're not going to vomit. There's no change of clothes for you here. I'd have thought you had a stronger stomach, but you're not as tough as I'd expected. Bit of a wimp. Anyway, take a look at Jerry's handiwork. Good, right? Obviously this isn't Lanie, since she's alive and kicking. This is, or was Pam Hodges, whom Jerry hanged. Technically, a guy named Carl Mathews hanged her, but he was carrying out Jerry's orders. He used a wire, instead of a rope, but that's just a variation on a theme. Wait a sec, I have some that I can show you." He puts his hand bag in the bag and draws out a reel of wire. "Here." He tosses it at her. "Catch."

His throw is soft, but she hadn't expected it; she drops the reel and it rolls across the floor, dragging the wire behind it. She tries to get to her feet to go after it.

"Don't move." Castle stands, quickly retrieves the reel, and returns to his chair. He points at her face. "You know, your eyes are bulging right now, and you keep opening and closing your mouth. Reminds me of a fish, but maybe that's just because of this wire. It's high-test fishing line. Like rope, it's cheap and sold just about anywhere that's within a hundred miles of the piscatorially inclined. Look at the picture." He moves his chair closer to her and closes his hand around her wrist, hard enough to hurt. "Look. At. It."

She looks at it.

"See how the wire dug into her flesh there? She hung from a beam for hours. It took her a long time to go. She died millimeter by millimeter, and oh, she was kicking. Alive and kicking in the worst possible sense, until she couldn't kick anymore. Pam Hodges looked exactly like Lanie. You know why? Because Kelly Nieman operated on her. Gave her cheek implants, did a little bit of this and that so she'd be the twin that Lanie never had. Yup, Kelly Nieman, the woman who also improved you. Did you know that's how she describes her work? 'Improvements.' I've seen pre-surgery photos of you, and for once I do agree with the doctor. You're better looking as an ersatz Alexis than you were as a genuine Maureen. Sorry if that offends you."

Over the past few minutes, Castle has been watching her with laser-like focus. He has no other crime-scene photos to show her, to scare the bejeezus out of her, because every other shred of evidence, every horrific photo documentation of 3XK's victims, is gone. Tyson stole them. This is the best he has for breaking Maureen, so it will have to do.

"What do you think about this wire?" he asks, unspooling a bit of it. "Think I can reel you in?" He sees small changes in her eyes and her posture. She's getting ready to make some kind of a move. She's scared of death now, and she's really scared of him, but she has something to use. She knows where Alexis is. He wants to see how she'll play it, so he waits, tossing the reel from hand to hand.

Maureen shifts slightly. The facade is confidence, but the underpinning is terror. "Rick? Let's make a deal."

TBC

**A/N** Thanks for all the great support!


	12. Chapter 12

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Castle is impassive, though he feels anything but. He's taking a read of Maureen's sour, surly expression and the doubt that she almost certainly believes that she has concealed. "You want to make a deal, huh? Okay. Tell me what you have."

"Plenty."

"That's very…broad. You'll have to be more specific."

She crosses her arms over her chest like a petulant child, and pouts.

He gives her a moment before swinging his legs from the chair. "Looks like you're not ready to deal. I'm going out," he says as he stoops to retrieve the bag. He's halfway to the door when he hears her whisper.

"Wait." She clears her throat, ups the volume. "Wait."

He makes a half turn, notes that she's a little less sullen than she had been. "Yes?"

"I'll give you some specifics."

He's still by the door, ready to leave if he's not satisfied with the first thing she offers. "Such as?"

"Such as where Alexis is now. Not exactly where, but I'll tell you the city or town."

He can't react, can't lose control, can't can't can't can't. Not when he's this close. So he asks casually, "Where's the shoe?"

She looks genuinely puzzled. "Huh?"

"I'm waiting for the shoe to drop. The first shoe. What you want from me in exchange for giving me some idea of Alexis's whereabouts."

There's a steely edge to her speedy reply. "Money."

He more than matches both her steeliness and her speed. "I figured. Standard answer, but I'd hoped that you might have a little more imagination. Are you thinking of an infinite installment plan, like a blackmailer? Or a one-time payment? Stocks? Bonds? Diamonds? Bullion? Cash? Euros? Dollars— American, Canadian, Bahamian, Australian? Pounds? Kroner? Pesos? Yen? Rupees? Dinars? How do you want it delivered? Unnumbered bank account? Unnumbered bills in a bag like this?" He fakes a throw to her. "C'mon, Maureen, surely you've given this some thought."

He sees that she's cowering slightly, as if she's afraid of a beating. He's anticipating her answer: offshore account.

"Cash, in an offshore account."

Bingo. "And how much money I am supposed to wire to this offshore account?"

"Five million dollars."

"Forget it."

"Your darling daughter isn't worth five million?"

"We're not discussing Alexis's worth, it's your bullshit offer. You think I'm laying out that kind of money just to hear you say 'Bogota,' or 'Tulsa' or 'Hong Kong'?"

She barely moves her lips as she grits out, "Five million."

"Okay, I'm done. What you don't know is that Beckett and the boys have a bead on your Doctor Nieman now, and good leverage, and from her we'll get to Alexis. It's going to take a while, but she's the strongest person I know other than Kate. She's held on for a year and half already. Since your puppeteers think that you and I are on a little father-daughter jaunt, I can leave you here for awhile. You might die of boredom in this room," he says, as he takes six bottles of Poland Spring from the bag and puts them on the floor, "but not of thirst. This should hold you for a couple of days. Who knows? When I come back, I might bring Alexis with me."

Then, in a display of sangfroid that he's pleased and astonished to have pulled off, he opens the door and walks out. The first thing he does when he's in the main part of the house is to cut the lights to the safe room. The second is to race to the bathroom, where he empties the contents of his stomach. He rinses his mouth, splashes tepid water on his face and braces his forearms against the sink. He put on a good front for Maureen, but he's working as hard as he's worked on anything in his life to crush his panic. They don't have a bead on Nieman; they have no leverage whatsoever. They have nothing.

He can't allow himself to think about his daughter's psychological condition. Yes, she's strong, especially mentally; she is an incredibly determined kid. Young woman. Kid. She's still only 20, and she's been locked away and subjected to God knows what for 18 months. Strange, but he's not worried about what kind of shape she's in physically. He's convinced—maybe foolishly, but he won't address the possibility—that Tyson and Nieman have kept her well fed, let her exercise, because they still need her. But her state of mind? That he can't visit.

Even in his despair, he has been checking his phone regularly to make sure that Maureen hasn't done anything, made any moves. Thank God for the night-vision cameras: he can see that she's sitting exactly where he had left her. But now he's looking down into the sink. He hangs his head for several minutes before shaking it like a wet dog, and slams one hand hard against the counter. He was wrong. They do have something. He has something. He has Maureen, and the fissures in her are deeper than those in him. He can break her, and he will. But he'll have to do it fast, because he's sure that she has to check in at regular intervals, even after all this time. He takes a series of calming breaths, stands up and retraces his steps to the safe room, activating the lights just before he walks through the door.

"Miss me?" he asks jauntily as he takes his seat again. "Hmm? Okay, here's the thing. I've decided to give you a quick rundown on some basic principles of negotiation. You make an offer. If I reject it, you don't repeat the offer. Got that? It's pretty simple. So since the first round didn't go well, I'm going to make an offer to _you_. I will deposit two and a half million dollars in an offshore account in your name that you will be able to draw on when, and only when, Alexis is safely home. At some point before that happens, you will be moved to a safe house, and when Alexis is back with me, you'll be free to go wherever you want."

She starts to say something and he shushes her.

"I'm not finished. You're going to tell me exactly where she is. A full address."

"Like hell."

"Really? 'Like hell'? That's not an effective negotiating tool." He waits a minute before continuing, with no change of expression. "Have you been wondering, while you're in these cozy confines, how we found about you? I already told you that some of your prep work was sloppy, though I'm embarrassed to say that I wasn't the one who saw it first, and that's what gave you away. It took Kate a long time to convince me of it because—well, I'm sure you know why. But the point is, she did. And your sloppiness—cockiness, whatever you want to call it—didn't end there."

He reaches casually into his pocket and withdraws something. "Recognize this? It's the SIM card from your from your cell. I know, because it was a huge issue between Alexis and me a few years ago, that she would have told you about how I installed an app to track her. She was justifiably furious with me. So, not only did I delete the app, I promised never to do anything like that again. Pledged that I would respect her privacy, certainly privacy as it related to anything to do with her cell phone, one hundred percent. And that's what made you overconfident about the security of your phone and your computer. Because she told you that. And you thought they were safe. But Tori, the tech whiz at the Twelfth, will be able to get everything off this. Everything. Kate took your laptop as soon as I left the loft yesterday and secured it. If need be, she will give it to Tori or to one of her Fed friends who will break through any firewall you or your pals set up. The only reason Kate and I have hung onto your little electronic lifelines is because we're interested in getting the barracudas, not the little goldfish, you. We're willing to help you out. If necessary though, we can feed you to the big, nasty fish once we have Alexis. If Kate was able to find you all by herself, don't you think Jerry and Kelly can?"

Fuck. She doesn't give a fuck anymore. She'll get out of here or she won't, but she's backing Castle. A furious parent, especially one with his resources, is scarier than Tyson and Nieman now. And so she tells him. "Staten Island."

He feels his blood drain away but keeps his voice even. "Staten Island? Alexis is there? Since when? How?"

"Dr. Nieman flew us—Alexis, Pi and me—on a private plane from Costa Rica to Canada and we came across the border in a van. She drugged Alexis and put her in a compartment that was built under the back seat where Pi and I were sitting. I had a fake passport and wore brown contact lenses and a wig with dark curly hair until we got to Staten Island, which took forever. And then Pi and I came into Manhattan."

"And you've seen Alexis since then?"

"Sure. A lot of times."

"Give me the address."

"I'll tell you, but you'll never get in. The house is a fucking fortress. And it's rigged. You go in there, the whole place will blow up."

TBC


	13. Chapter 13

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Beckett had done everything she could to distract herself, but nothing had worked. She tried to read but kept stalling on the same paragraph; took a bath but got out because she hated being in the tub alone; abandoned a favorite old movie after ten minutes, and made a batch of brownies that she first undercooked and then burned. But finally, finally, it was time for her to leave for the Hamptons. She cleared the city quite easily, but she's out of her mind with worry as she drives east on the Long Island Expressway. She and Castle had agreed not to communicate at all during his 24-hour session with Maureen, but that as soon as the time had elapsed she would call him from the car. She has phoned four times in thirty minutes, and each call has gone to voicemail. What the hell had she been thinking, telling him to take Maureen to the house? She has no idea what the girl is capable of, really. She's being handled by Tyson and Nieman, for God's sake. Beckett calls her husband again. Voicemail. And again. Voicemail. And again. Voicemail. Is she going to arrive and confront carnage? Should she pull over now, and get backup? But if she does and everything is okay, she'll have tipped their hand. She decides to go in alone; at least she's armed.

In the Hamptons safe room, Castle is working on the laptop that he had stashed in the duffel bag and has quickly isolated the address that Maureen had given him. It was for an old, ramshackle house in a heavily wooded, lightly populated section of northern Staten Island, near the water, and he immediately understands its appeal for Tyson. There are no neighbors within earshot and there's nothing of interest in the area: no historical markers, no unusual rock formations, no rare migratory birds. Bored teenagers looking for something to vandalize would be scared off by the evidence of a very large, very hungry, very vicious dog on the premises. There is easy access to the water, which could serve as a good escape route, particularly at night.

Castle looks at Maureen, who is still sitting quietly, her expression a balanced mix of sullenness and relief. It gives him a jolt, and he checks his watch. Shit, shit, shit, he'd completely lost track of the time. Beckett must be worried.

"Don't go anywhere, Maureen," he says, as he puts his laptop back in the bag and picks it up. He walks through the door and activates the lock. As soon as he's in the living room he checks his phone and finds a screenful of missed calls from Kate. He calls her back and she answers almost instantly, forcing herself to sound casual.

"Hi, Castle. You and Alexis having a good time?"

Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God. "Yup," he replies, "but I missed you. We've made a big pot of chili; are you almost here?"

"Five minutes out, babe."

"Okay. I'll start the coffee. You've probably been drinking that Route 495 swill, am I right?" He wants to keep her on the line, just for the comfort of her voice in his ear, but he never takes his eye off the security camera that's focussed on Maureen.

"Oh, please. I made coffee at home and brought it with me."

"Which you finished at least an hour ago and then you got some gas-station poison, emphasis on gas."

Her heart rate is slowing, and she's reasonably sure that she's helping him, too. "I might have. And I might also have bought you and Alexis some Häagen-Dazs bars, the vanilla ones with almond bits in the chocolate covering. The ones you swear you treat yourself to only occasionally, crumpled wrappers and ice-cream sticks in the kitchen wastebasket to the contrary."

He laughs, a big, rolling, genuine laugh that rumbles through his chest. "Ah, you're such a detective, Beckett, even at home. Is nothing sacred?"

"Not much, Castle." And she laughs in return. "I'm almost there." She ends the call and thinks, almost there. Maybe we are almost there. Because even though he's a good actor—thank you, Martha—he's not quite that good. He sounded amazingly calm. More than that: he seemed assured. Like he had figured something out, had made some kind of breakthrough. She pulls into the driveway, more hopeful than she has been in months, and sprints to the house.

He's waiting five feet inside the door, and takes a full body hit when she throws herself on him. "Castlecastlecastlecastlecastle. Jesus, I thought something had happened to you. You didn't answer the phone. I thought Maureen had—" She's stopped by Castle's ferocious kiss and they slide to the floor, mouth to mouth, chest to chest, belly to belly, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, knee to knee. She feels the same rush she experienced when he had pushed her up against the door that night, that first night, and she wants him to take her exactly as he had then. She can hardly breathe for wanting him.

Castle peels himself off her, but she drags him back. "Kate, no. I'm sorry. I know, I know." He pushes the hair from her forehead. "We have to see Maureen first, okay? I can't leave her just now. We have to watch her. Just for a little bit. We have to get up, we have to get up." He looks into her eyes and sees that she is about to shatter. Everything, every closely held fear, is about to leave her in tiny pieces, in sharp-edged fragments, so he pulls her tight into an embrace. "Shh, shh. It's fine. We'll be fine. Shh. I promise. There's a way out, we've got it." He can feel her begin to let go against him, into in.

He hasn't given nearly enough consideration to the stress that Kate had been under; she had been plagued with doubt and anxiety and eventually terror for a year and a half. Had lived first with the possibility of this, then the probability, then the certainty. For him, it had been only days. "Kate," he whispers. "Is it all right if I pick you up carry you to bed or the sofa?"

"Sofa," she says so quietly that he inuits her answer more than hears it. He cradles her in his arms and takes her to the living room. Even though he thinks that Maureen won't try anything in the safe room, he can't risk it; he needs to check the security camera constantly.

"I'm going to make you some tea," he says, keeping his hand on her shoulder. "All right? Will you be all right here for a couple of minutes? Or do you want to come with me?"

She nods, but she cannot choose. He will have to do that for her.

Her eyes look huge; her hand, inside his own, feels tiny. Like a small bird, nestling in his palm. He helps her up and they walk to the kitchen; she perches on a stool while he makes tea, looking at his phone at closely-spaced intervals to keep watch on Maureen. While they sip from their mugs, he very calmly gives Beckett a précis of his time with Maureen. He begins at the end, with the news about Alexis being in the house in Staten Island, before he fills her in on the rest: how he had drugged Maureen with sleeping pills to get her to the safe room, what he had done, what she had said.

With each bit of information, he sees the steel come back into her spine. Her back straightens; her eyes are bright. Her recovery period is stunningly fast. "I used to spend a lot of time thinking about how strong you are, Kate. It always amazes me. But after you brought down Bracken last year, I started—not taking it for granted, exactly, but accepting it. I just knew it was there. And then, after last summer, after I got back from wherever the hell I was, I could hardly bear to think of what you had gone through while I was missing, so I closed it out. And I'm so sorry. So sorry that I didn't have any inkling of what you were going through. You've been living with this horror for so long."

"That's exactly what I've been calling it in my mind, Castle. This horror."

"Here's what I'd like to do right now, if you agree. We have a lot to go on now, and I have some ideas I want to discuss with you, and I'd like to hear yours. I don't want to have to keep monitoring Maureen, so I'd like to drug her, safely, as I did last night, with sleeping pills."

"You don't think she'll fight you, or us, on this?"

He shakes his head, and gives her an encouraging smile. "No. She's scared and she's resigned. She's also smart, and she realizes that co-operating with us is her only way out now. Do you want to go down and see her, or would you rather not? I completely understand if you want to stay here."

And there she is, his take-no-prisoners, bad-ass Detective Beckett. It's all over her face and in every muscle and tendon in her body. "Absolutely not. I'm with you." She slides from the stool and takes his hand. "Let's make the hot chocolate with the secret ingredient and take it down there."

"You don't want to go over anything first, what we're going to say to her?"

"We don't need to Castle," she says, opening the cupboard and grabbing the tin of hot chocolate. "We know exactly what to say. We're partners. She doesn't stand a chance."

TBC

**A/N **Please accept my apologies for the delay on this chapter. I've found this story very tricky to write and have been breaking away to produce some less tension-filled Castle stories. But I promise to complete this in the near future: the finish line is in sight.


	14. Chapter 14

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Castle and Beckett are on their way to the safe room with a Thermos of Ambien-laced hot chocolate. She was right, Castle thinks, they didn't need to go over what they were going to say to Maureen. Still, despite his complete faith in his wife, he is filled with low-level anxiety about how she will react.

Maureen jumps noticeably when she sees who comes through the door with Castle. "Kate?" Scrambling to assert herself, she quickly follows up. "Look who the cat dragged in."

"You referring to me or to Castle, Maureen? God, I love not having to call you Alexis any more." Kate's face is expressionless, something she has learned to do in years on the job. She gets a chair and pulls it across the floor until it's about six feet away from but directly in front of the young woman. "That's you being bad-ass, right? Only here's the thing: you have absolutely no idea what bad-ass is. I'm an officer of the law." She inches the chair forward. "A truly, truly bad-ass officer of the law. Castle, here—" she jerks a thumb in his direction, "has known who you are for only a few days. But I've known you weren't Alexis for more than a year. And in every spare minute that I've had, in every microsecond when my brain lets me process something other than what I should be doing right then, I have thought about you. How I could kill you. How I could, first, make you suffer for a very long time. Maybe longer than Alexis has, hmm?" She scoots the chair forward just a hair. "I wouldn't be the first cop to kill someone, and I sure as hell wouldn't be the first to get away with it."

She turns to Castle, who is standing a few feet away. "Could I have some water, please, babe? I'm thirsty. This could take a while."

He takes a bottle from his newly-replenished bag, unscrews the cap, and hands it to her. He's so transfixed by what Kate is doing that he's surprised that he heard her request.

"Thank you." She takes a long drink.

"I've been on the receiving end of torture, as you know. You didn't see the after effects since you weren't around much then, but they were horrific. Castle could tell you more than I. Give you the details. The physical ones, the emotional ones, the sexual ones." She nudges the chair forward again. "Even after that, I thought that I wouldn't wish that torture on anyone, never mind be the person who administered it. Not even to Bracken. Not even to the man who murdered my mother. But that was before I was certain about you and what you have done. And now? Now I could easily put you, Jerry Tyson and Kelly Nieman in a room together, and submit you to protracted pain that none of you could imagine. Before I killed you." She lowers her voice to a whisper. "I promise you."

Maureen is truly unnerved now. She'd thought she had known fear earlier, when Rick was first talking with her, but Kate is different. Maybe because she's a woman. Maybe because she has skills that Maureen doesn't want to consider. Maybe because she knows that, if pressed, she'll use them. Maybe because Beckett is so calm.

Beckett leans forward, closer to her than she has been in days. "Of course, what I'd really like to do is put a bullet right between your fucking eyes. I could do it from a couple of hundred yards away, no problem. Ask Castle. He's seen me at the firing range. It's the only way I could do it, from that far away, because I would be looking at a face so like Alexis's, and that would upset me. But from two or three hundred yards, your face wouldn't be that clear. And I'd pull the trigger. And you'd be gone." She finishes the bottle of water, stands up, and brushes her palms across her thighs as if she has just had a casual conversation, maybe had a snack that left crumbs on her lap and needed to be dusted off.

"But what we're going to do today is to come to an understanding. One that will keep me from shooting you between your fucking eyes and will in fact keep you alive and happy. Or as happy as a miserable person like you can be. Before we go any further, though, Castle and I are going ask you a question. We need one small bit of information."

"What?" Maureen asks. "You know where Alexis is. I told you. Told Rick. What else can I tell you?"

"Pretty simple, really. It's a question about fear, which is something I know a lot about. In fact, I know that you're terrified right now. Know, without looking or inhaling deeply, that you wet your pants a minute ago. Humiliating, isn't it? More shameful than puking your guts out. And it feels disgusting, too. Well, you're going to have to live with that for a bit. I'd say I'm sorry, but I've learned what a mistake it is to lie to people."

Beckett turns to Castle, who hasn't moved since giving her the water. "Babe? Would you like to bring over that other chair so we can sit together while we chat with Maureen?"

He nods his head, tries not to let her see how hard he is swallowing. With the chair in one hand and his bag in another, he walks over to join her. He's seen her in interrogation hundreds of times, but he's never seen her like this. And this? He'll let her do the talking.

"So, Maureen," Beckett says almost cheerily. "You spent a hell of a lot of time with Jerry Tyson, especially at the beginning of your little—" she pauses. "Experiment." She pauses again. When she speaks now, it's with a small shift in tone and timbre. Castle doesn't know if Maureen can even detect it, but he can. She is in for the kill. "Everyone has fears. Everyone. I don't care what some testosterone-fueled asshole tells you, that there is nothing that scares him, it's not true. Categorically. So what's Tyson afraid of?"

"Nothing."

"Oh, please."

"Really."

"Not possible. There's something that haunts him. Something that will turn him into a pants-wetter in an instant. He hasn't put it that way to you. Didn't sit by the campfire telling ghost stories and say, 'Oh, there is one thing that scare the bejeezus out of me.' But he is afraid of something, something that at night winds around him like a fer-de-lance, the pretty-sounding pit viper, and shoots poison into him. It's probably something from a long time ago, which makes it even worse." She locks eyes with Maureen. No contest there. She starts counting silently, and at seventeen, Maureen cracks.

"Gas."

"Gas? What kind."

"Propane."

"What happened?"

"Something when he was really little, like four. He was living with his mom and his brother in a trailer and they had propane gas tanks. There was some kind of explosion and fire and he saw his mother burn alive. And then he went into foster care. That's all I know. But I overheard him say something to Doctor Nieman when we were still in Costa Rica, about how wherever we were, since we were going to be in some dump, it had to be a dump without propane. And then he told her."

"Okay. So. You're wondering what now? What now is this: you're going to have some nice hot chocolate. Help you sleep after this— trying—day you've had."

She turns to Castle. "Would you pour her some, please, Castle?"

He's not sure he can pass it to Maureen. He doesn't have it in him, but Beckett does. He unscrews the top of the Thermos, pours a large cup, and gives it to her. She hooks her finger into his, holds it for a moment and gives him a small and encouraging smile.

Beckett passes the hot chocolate to the young woman. "Here, Maureen. Drink up. That's not a request, by the way. Or a suggestion."

She watches her drink it. She had wondered if she'd sip at it, dragging it out, or drink it as fast as the heat of it allowed. She bet on the latter. She was right. "Cup, please?" she asks, extending her hand. Maureen gives it to her and Beckett extends her own hand to Castle, wiggling the cup to indicate that he should refill it.

Five minutes later, it was done. All but the sleeping. Beckett and Castle watched Maureen fight it briefly and then surrender. And when she was out cold, Beckett stood up, gave Castle her hand and together they walked out of the room and locked it.

"Propane, Castle," she says as soon as they've cleared the stairs. She can hardly keep the excitement from spilling out. "Con Edison. We've got him."

TBC


	15. Chapter 15

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

While Maureen had been in the depths of what Castle calls Assisted Sleeping, he and Beckett had laid out plans: very good, very strong plans for the capture of Jerry Tyson and the rescue of Alexis. They could not be implemented in any way, or set in motion, from the Hamptons, and they all involved the full cooperation of Captain Gates. It's time to head home to Manhattan.

It's Sunday night, but because it's both very late and the middle of winter, traffic to the city will be light. They're leaving the Ferrari in the garage and going back in Beckett's car. "You ready to roll, Castle?" she asks.

"Yes," he says. He's carrying Maureen, who is wrapped in an old quilt. "Damned if I was going to cover her in a nice blanket. I'm going to burn this later, I swear."

They use the interior door to the garage, and Beckett opens the back door of the car. Castle slips Maureen inside, buckles the seat belt, walks around and slides in next to her. He's staying with her on the remote chance that she wakes up and tries something foolish. Beckett is driving, and stays right at the speed limit. She doesn't want to be stopped for any reason. Using the rear-view mirror, she monitors Castle and twice sees Maureen's head roll onto his shoulder. Both times, he pushes it away, in revulsion, towards the window. They spend most of the trip in silence, speaking only a few times.

When they reach Broome Street, they park in their building's garage and take the elevator to the loft, Castle carrying Maureen just as he had a few hours ago. He drops her onto the sofa in his office. Even though she should sleep a good deal longer, they take the precaution of handcuffing both her wrists and her ankles. Beckett is due in the precinct in three hours. Castle insists that she nap, and promises to wake her in time for her to shower and have some breakfast.

The door between the bedroom and the office is open, and Castle has positioned his chair so that he can watch both his wife and Maureen as they sleep. There's no danger of him remaining anything less than fully alert: the combination of adrenaline and caffeine insure that. He looks at Beckett's face and feels a wave of shame roar over him. The unforgivable things he had said and done when she told him about Alexis, and her insistence that there is nothing to forgive. He still needs to forgive himself, but that's for another time. He shifts slightly and looks at Maureen, wondering if Alexis really is within his grasp, wondering if tomorrow night he might be watching her sleep, if she can sleep. His daughter, his child, who has been gone for a year and a half. He lets himself think about taking the quilt that covers Maureen, drawing it up over her face, pressing it down until she cannot breathe. Until she stops breathing. It would be so easy. She wouldn't fight him, there would be no struggle. Is it unconscionable, is it monstrous, that he's conjuring this? Have Jerry Tyson and Kelly Nieman reduced him to this? It's not as if he's going to do it. He permits himself this grotesque fantasy because it releases, ever so slightly, the tension and the terror that have seized him since that night after dinner when Beckett told him that Alexis "felt like a different person." He shifts his gaze again to his wife. Where would he be without her? That's something that he cannot afford to contemplate, an abyss he cannot look into, especially now.

When the alarm on his phone rings he tiptoes to the bed to wake Beckett. "Time for a shower," he whispers. "Sorry I can't join you." As soon as she's up he checks on Maureen again; she has moved a fraction, but is still out cold. It's safe for him to go to the kitchen, where he makes coffee and toast, and slices oranges into wedges. By the time he carries the breakfast tray to their bedroom, Beckett is already half dressed and putting on her makeup. He perches on the end of the bed so that he can monitor Maureen but also talk very quietly with Beckett, going over their plans. He'll stay at home until he hears from her. They can't trust any kind of phone or computer to communicate with anyone, and while Beckett is putting on her coat Castle gets five burner phones from the safe; he pockets one and hands over the others for her, Gates, Ryan, and Esposito.

Stepping into the bullpen from the elevator, Beckett heads straight for the captain's office and knocks on the door.

"Detective?"

"Good morning, sir. Castle and I have acquired some extremely important information about 3XK." She pauses for a moment, bracing herself against the doorframe.

"Over the weekend? From?"

"From Maureen. I'd like to go over it with you and Ryan and Esposito, now, if that's possible. And sir? Excuse me, but this is five-alarm urgent."

Gates's pen slips from her fingers and lands on her desk with a click. "If Mister Castle used a phrase like that with me, I'd be more than inclined to dismiss it, but not you. All right, ask the others to join us. "

Beckett rounds up the boys and they all take seats in the captain's office. Clearly and concisely—not for nothing is she both a grade-A detective and the daughter of two lawyers—she lays out what she and Castle have learned from Maureen, including the house where Tyson has been keeping Alexis and, most important, his Achilles heel. She also outlines the plan that they have devised for capturing 3K and for rescuing her stepdaughter.

"Before we go any further, Detective," Gates says, leaning in, "I just want to make sure that you and Mister Castle are truly confident about the accuracy of all this? That she's telling you the truth?"

"I understand, sir. And yes, we are. Ultimately Maureen had to choose between 3XK and us, and she chose us. She spent hours locked in a room with Castle when he was in full-on father mode, which is terrifying, I can attest. All without his laying a finger on her, which probably heightened her anxiety."

"And you, Detective?"

"Me?"

"Were you 'terrifying'?"

Beckett allows herself a small smile. "I never laid a finger on her, either, sir. But when I was making things very plain to her, she did, uh, wet her pants."

"Way to go, Beckett!" Espo says, as Ryan chuckles and Gates does not entirely repress her visible if silent approval.

"We'll have to use some undercover cops from another precinct initially, won't we, sir?" Beckett continues. "Since we can't run the risk of Tyson recognizing anyone?"

"Absolutely. The Fourth would be good," Gates says. "They're nowhere near us and they have a top-notch team for dealing with a situation like this. Their captain and I were classmates at the academy, so I think I can grease the wheels pretty quickly. Still, it's going to take a day to set this up."

"Yes, sir, that's what Castle and I thought."

"We should add a few people from Staten Island, shouldn't we?" Ryan asks. "The one-one-nine, probably, since it's closest to Tyson's place. It's possible that he's seen someone from that precinct and if one of those showed up at his house he might be less suspicious."

"Yeah, even though he's kept a low profile, and always wears a very basic disguise, he does have to go out sometimes," Beckett says. "Maureen told us where he shops for groceries, what drug stores he uses. He never goes to the same one twice in two months, for fear of anyone remembering him, and he usually drives to big suburban stores in Jersey, but still."

They go over and over the plan, nailing down every detail before involving other cops. "Sir, even though we're trying to limit the number of people who know anything about this, could we bring Tori into the loop? She's totally up to speed on everything high-tech, and it would also free up Ryan to work full-time with us."

"Consider it done. One more thing. Maureen. I'm assuming that we should bring her into protective custody now."

"She has to make contact with Tyson at regular intervals, and we're sure that he's tracking her phone, so I think it's best if she can stay at the loft at least until we go to Staten Island. I don't think we should let her go to class, but she could say that she has a stomach bug or something, and is staying at home to be looked after. Castle is with her now, of course.''

"I'm not wild about the idea, but I see your point. Mister Castle will need to be spelled at some point, though, since he'll be coming here. I could send a detail. They can enter your loft without going by the doorman or being seen on the sidewalk, is that right?"

"Yes. If they ride over with me, lying down on the floor, we can go straight to the garage. No one will know that they're there."

At four o'clock the next afternoon, less than 32 hours after Beckett had approached Gates, teams from the Twelfth and Fourth precincts and two highly experienced employees of Con Edison descend on Staten Island in an assortment of vehicles, arriving over a period of ten minutes. Four cops from the One Hundred Nineteenth meet some of them in an underground parking garage and an amphibious crew waits in the water near Tyson's house. Castle and LT are in a panel truck that advertises itself as belonging to an HVAC company. Having LT there had been Beckett's suggestion: the officer has a better relationship with the writer than anyone else in the precinct except her. He's completely professional but easygoing and he could keep Castle from doing anything stupid. Castle may understand the danger more than anyone, but he also has the highest stakes, and she isn't convinced that he can keep himself in check.

The Con Ed truck and a 119th squad car pull up outside the house. It's an overcast February day, and snow is threatening; sunset is less than an hour away, and lights are visible in some of the windows. The two workers from the utility company, accompanied by one local policeman, walk up a short flight of steps and knock on the door. When no one answers after thirty seconds, they knock again. Still no one.

"Hello?" one Con Ed man calls out. "We have a dangerous situation, here. We need to evacuate everyone in the area immediately."

There's a sound of footsteps; they stop on the other side of the door, but it remains closed. "Who is it?" It's a man's voice.

"Sir, we're from Con Edison. There's been a oil storage facility explosion a mile and a half from here."

"Yeah?" He sounds cranky.

"There's an old propane gas line running directly under this property, and it's in serious jeopardy. We're under orders to evacuate everyone in this area. Now."

The three men—as well as a dozen more people who are watching and listening to them on a live feed, courtesy of a sophisticated device in the Con Ed truck—hear a series of clicks as locks are disengaged. A nondescript man—30-something, medium build, about five-ten—opens the door a few inches. He's wearing a bland expression, but there are a few beads of sweat at his hairline and he swipes at them with the back of his hand. "You telling me I have to leave?" Jerry Tyson asks.

TBC

**A/N** I apologize for the long wait since the last chapter. To all who hung in there: thank you!


	16. Chapter 16

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

"Yes, sir, you do. I really can't say it any stronger than that. We got a potential deadly situation."

"There's a pipeline here?" Sweat has reappeared on Tyson's temples, and there's a sheen above his lip now.

"Yes. Superstorm Sandy didn't do it any favors, either."

"If you'd just come with us, Mister—?" Con Edison No. 2 says.

"Rodgers."

"Mister Rodgers. Let's go."

"I need to get my stuff," Tyson says, a slight tremor in his voice.

"Fraid there's no time," Con Edison No. 1 says. "Just grab your coat and your wallet and keys."

Tyson, still peering through a crack in the door, looks over his shoulder and then back at the three men on his small porch. "Uh, my girlfriend—"

"Your girlfriend? Your girlfriend's here?" Con Edison No. 1 asks. "She has to leave, too. Is that your dog barking in the back? You should get it."

"Sick. She's sick. In bed. Flu, bad flu. I'll— I'll go get her. I'm gonna have to carry her." Tyson closes the door.

"ASAP, sir!" the previously silent cop calls out as the tumblers fall in the lock.

They can just decipher some noise from inside the house: footsteps, a few doors banging, a chain rattling. What they can't hear is any conversation.

In various vehicles parked in the vicinity but out of sight, everyone is on edge, no one more than Castle and Beckett. Despite her years of experience, despite her almost legendary sangfroid, she is stretched even tauter than he because it was she who formulated the basic plan. They built it together, looked at it from every possible angle, strengthened it, but she bears the responsibility. She has been weighed down by a poisonous, ever-shifting mixture of worry, anguish, rage and guilt for more than a year. What if this doesn't work? What if Alexis—. She can't finish the thought, except that it's hard not to. It's flooding her brain, winding sinuously through every sulcus, and it terrifies her. She's trying hard to believe that she, Castle, and the rest of the team have considered every eventuality, but what if they haven't?

Beckett is grateful that she's alone so that she can run through things on her own. It's not her car, but one from the Fourth, because they can't run the risk, however slight, that Tyson might recognize it. She's grateful, too, that no one is here to see her shiver, not just from the cold but from nerves. What's holding her together is the knowledge that Tyson has a weak spot, and that they're going to exploit it. He has been so successful for so long that he has grown just a little careless. The old Tyson would never have articulated that fear, even in a place where he thought no one could overhear it. The old Tyson would never have acknowledged any weakness. Not to anyone, including himself.

On the drive from Manhattan to Staten Island she had been occupied with her stepdaughter's psychological state; she still is. With Castle's permission and Gates's knowledge, she had gone to see Burke to ask his advice. He had briefed her on a raft of problems that Alexis might have to deal with after a year and a half in captivity. Beckett knows that the young woman is extremely strong: when she was kidnapped and held hostage in Paris she had displayed enormous resourcefulness, and she was only 18. Still, she had suffered from nightmares afterwards and Burke had recommended a therapist for her, one who worked exclusively with adolescents. She had seen that doctor briefly, and productively. Now she's only weeks away from being officially an adult, and while Beckett is confident—or at least hopeful—that her psychological makeup as well as her experience will have kept her from succumbing to anything like Stockholm syndrome, there are sure to be other difficulties. Beckett had asked Burke if he would work with Alexis if she wanted that, and he had agreed. It's one more tenuous lifeline for her as she waits.

And then she, and everyone else who is monitoring the house, sees him. Sees them. Tyson is coming through the door with an enormous Doberman Pinscher on a leash looped around his hand. But 3XK is also carrying something—no, someone—someone who is wrapped in a quilt, the top of her red head just visible, and the sight is so perversely familiar, so like Castle carrying Maureen out of the Hamptons house early yesterday, that Beckett gags.

At the same moment, 500 yards away, Castle tries to propel himself from the truck, stymied by LT having had the foresight to lock the doors and by LT himself pinning the frantic father in his seat. "Alexis," he says. "Alexis. Alexis. Oh, God. Alexis."

"Shh, Castle. Shh," LT says. "Hang on, man. They got this."

Castle stills under his hand, and breathing begins to even out. "I will kill him," he says finally, his voice an unsettling combination of flatness and steel. "I will kill that fucking Tyson. I will. I will fucking kill him."

On the small porch, the Con Edison men and the cop back away slightly at the sight of the dog. Then the cop—the burly Officer O'Neill—steps forward. "Lemme help you? You got your hands full with that dog. Good looking animal. I could carry your girlfriend. She asleep?"

Tyson draws her a little closer. "It's the meds. She's on this stuff, knocks her out."

"Yeah," O'Neill says calmly, placing one hand lightly under the quilted Alexis. "Not sure I could handle the dog, you know? Look's like a one-man Doberman." O'Neill is a bear of a guy, but very quick on his feet: he has twice been on the NYPD's winning boxing team in the Battle of the Badges. Before Tyson can protest, before he even registers any movement, Alexis is in the massive cradle of the cop's arms. "I got her," the cop says affably, and turns to walk down the steps.

"Wait," Tyson says. "I want to put her in my car. It's behind the house."

Castle is completely still, seemingly frozen in place. LT, maintaining a cool façade, is on high alert.

In her borrowed car Beckett is beseeching someone, a nameless God. "Please let them have done it. Please. Please. Please. Please."

The bizarre trio, accompanied by a dog the size of motorcycle, is skirting the side of the house and heading for a slightly-the-worse-for-wear dark gray four-door sedan. It's beat up just enough to deter thieves and not quite badly enough to draw the attention of anyone else. An under-the-radar ride, which is precisely what Tyson requires.

"You want I should put her in the back so she can lay down?" O'Neill asks, steering Tyson towards the driver's side. "Or you want the dog in the back and her in the front with you?"

"Front, front," Tyson says tersely, opening the back door so that the dog can jump in.

"Hey, sir? Mister Rodgers?" O'Neill looks over the roof.

"Please, please, please," Beckett implores again from the privacy of her own (borrowed) slightly-the-worse-for-wear dark gray four-door sedan.

"You got a flat tire here."

"What?"

"A flat. Front tire this side, flat as a bad pancake. You're gonna have to ride with us."

Esposito and Ryan, hearing this in the safety of another car, remain silent, but bump fists. "Way to go, Scubas," Espo whispers. Two members of the NYPD Scuba team had obviously done their job, slithering out of the water and crawling to the car, camouflaged by the long, marshy grass, out of sight from almost any part of the house. They had punctured the tire and left, all in a matter of seconds.

"No," Tyson says firmly. "I want my car. I'm taking it. I'll just change the tire."

"No time. You can get us killed. We gotta go." O'Neill is already halfway to the front of the house, and the Con Ed men are just a few yards away. "We'll drive you to the high school. You and your girlfriend and the dog. Man, she really is out cold. What's her name?"

"Meredith," Tyson says, trying to keep up with O'Neill's lengthy stride.

"People are gonna be put up in the gym. At the high school. Red Cross is taking care of things. They got beds, blankets, food, the whole nine yards. They'll make some kind of arrangements for pets, too. Crates and that. Gonna be overnight, anyway, even if they get the fire out. Just to be on the safe side, you know? I'm sure you'll be back in the ay em. Unless. Well. Yeah, here we go. Meredith, she's a feather. I'll carry her to my car."

Another cop appears, running towards the house. "Get out! Get out! It's the propane. Get the hell out!"

Even on their tiny monitors, everyone involved—Castle, Beckett, LT, the boys, all the other cops—can see the blood drain from Tyson's face. And they can hear the dog's low, menacing growl.

TBC

**A/N** Thank you all, readers, reviewers, followers and favoriters. Special thanks to many new people who took the trouble to go back this week and read the entire story from the beginning.


	17. Chapter 17

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

"Tyson, you son of a bitch," Beckett says. "I knew it, you sick son of a bitch." The Doberman had been one of the first things that she'd considered when she'd begun to sketch the plan. She had been sure that Tyson would not just bring the dog out of the house, but deploy him. As she hears the growl now, a horrifying phrase, "unleash his fury," begins to run on a loop in her brain. Jesus, she thinks, that's what Tyson is really about to do. He's one move away from unleashing his fury.

She shudders, but she has prepared for this; they all have. When she first imagined what Tyson might have trained the glistening creature to do, she felt sick; the antidote was to map out a response, and she did. She's processing the scene on her monitor in picoseconds, beginning with the house, which is the residential equivalent of Tyson's car. It's nondescript and just shabby enough—slightly tilting front steps, faded blue aluminum siding, one shutter that's missing a slat, an uncluttered front yard with a scraggly lawn—to go completely unnoticed. Now she's focusing on the cop, the one whose appearance has made Tyson blanch. He's nailing it. He's here as a distraction, and it's working.

The cop who's shouting about propane is in fact from the K9 unit, and has eleven years' experience handling dogs. In the car at the gate is another K9 officer who also serves on the NYPD Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad; he's ready to shoot the dog with a tranquilizer if necessary—something that will stun him long enough for them to get him under control and in a crate.

Officer O'Neill, holding Alexis tight against his chest, feints left.

Tyson gives a one-word command to the dog.

The cop at the gate shoots the tranquilizer.

The dog goes down.

Tyson, probably for the first time in years, freezes, with his right hand in his pocket.

Four cops, armed with assault rifles, burst from the Con Ed truck.

"NYPD!"

"Down on your knees!"

"Hands in the air!"

"Take your hand out of your pocket!"

"Out of your pocket, asshole. Now."

Four rifles are aimed Tyson, who finally withdraws his hand. He's holding a small black plastic device, his index finger maybe half an inch above the button that's protruding slightly from the face of it.

In one of the unmarkeds that's parked around a bend in the road, Ryan turns his head towards his partner. "Archibald Fosse."

"Exactly," Espo says, as both men flash back two years to the man who, just a few feet outside his apartment, had set off the timer for a bomb that had almost killed Beckett and Castle.

"But not exactly."

"Yeah," Espo says, allowing himself a tiny smile.

Castle, immobile next to LT in the panel truck, has his eyes on Alexis and O'Neill, no one and nothing else.

Beckett, however, is focused on Tyson's right hand. "Knew you'd do that, too, Jerry," she says to the screen. "Go ahead. Press the button, I dare you. You gonna do it or not, you fucking coward?" She has spent too much time in his head—years, really, long before she and Castle were together—and she wants him out. She's certain of what he's weighing now: will they shoot him if he gets too close to pressing the button, or are they afraid he'll do it anyway? How quick are their reflexes? How quick are his? Should he press the button and take the house and everyone with him? It's clear to him now that there is no gas leak, that this is a setup. He must be mentally excoriating Kelly Nieman for not having warned him, and he must assume that Castle is nearby. If he presses the button, Alexis will die while her father watches. "You'd love that, wouldn't you?" Beckett says. "Might make your fiery death worthwhile, knowing that you'd condemn him to a tortured life, unending grief in which he blamed himself for everything. Or maybe blamed me for screwing it up. That would make your last moment on earth a triumphant one, wouldn't it?"

He does it. Kneeling in the dirt and winter-withered grass, Tyson presses the button. Nothing happens. There's no fireball, no roar of explosives, no smoke. The house is standing, as shabby as it was when all this started just a few minutes ago, unchanged, still intact.

Thank you, Tori, Beckett thinks as she watches Tyson press the button, and press it again. She and Castle had gotten the security code from Maureen, the password that was instrumental in Tori's remote dismantling of the bomb in Tyson's house. It was a nine-digit one, a transposition of Kelly Nieman's Social Security number: the last four numbers had become the first, in reverse order, the first four had become the last, also in reverse order, and the middle had remained the same.

The four cops with rifles have handcuffed Tyson, who is radiating an unnerving blend of hubris, hostility and surprise, and are transferring him to an armored van; the two men from the K9 corps are securing the dog in a crate. Castle moves faster than he ever has—LT made no attempt to stop him, even helped him out of the van—running and stumbling the distance of five football fields until he reaches O'Neill, who gently transfers Alexis to her father's arms. Castle's knees give way and he sits on the ground, rocking his daughter as if she were a toddler, oblivious to the controlled chaos all around them. More and more vehicles are arriving, including two SUVs with teams from the FBI, and an ambulance to transport Alexis to the hospital in Manhattan.

Desperate as Beckett is to be with Castle, she needs to call Gates. The captain had watched the takedown on a live feed, but had also been overseeing two important maneuvers in Manhattan. One was the transfer of Maureen from the loft to the highest-security protective custody; the other was the arrest of Kelly Nieman, whom the NYPD had been carefully monitoring. There was more than enough information on Maureen's laptop and cell phone to get a warrant for the doctor's arrest, on numerous counts. Gates quickly assures Beckett that both actions had gone smoothly.

"Sir, I'd like to ride in the ambulance with Castle and Alexis, if that's all right."

"If you hadn't asked, Kate," she says gently, "I'd have insisted on it."

A detective from the Fourth agrees to take the car back to the precinct, and Beckett bolts to the ambulance. She stops several yards short of it, and looks at Castle sitting next to Alexis, who is already hooked up to a couple of monitors. From Beckett's vantage point, the young woman appears to be in good physical condition. At least there's that. She's clean and well-fed. She's even paler than usual, but that's hardly surprising, given that she has been kept indoors—at least during daylight hours—for more than a year. Beckett shakes herself off, walks to the ambulance and hops in the back, taking a seat on the hard metal bench next to her husband.

He has Alexis's left hand in his right, and his concentration is such that he's unaware of movement inside until he feels his wife's thigh against his. Beckett wraps one hand around his and rests the other on Alexis's knee before pressing her forehead into the rock that's his shoulder. "She's back."

Richard Castle is an emotional man, but he almost never cries in front of anyone else, particularly strangers. He does now. The EMTs who are caring for his daughter witness scenes like this almost daily, and can tune it out. They can't give the family real privacy, but they can give them an approximation. Castle is still and silent—both rare conditions for him—but the tears are ceaseless. They have soaked much of the front of his shirt and part of his collar. He's gripping Beckett's hand so hard that it's painful, but she's grateful for it. She removes her other hand from the gurney, grabs a small box of Kleenex that's opposite them and wipes his cheeks. He turns to her at last. "Thank you, Kate. I will thank you every minute for the rest of my life. I promise you."

She cradles one side of his jaw in her palm and smiles. "Not necessary."

"It is," he says, before taking her hand from his cheek, kissing it, and returning his gaze to his daughter. His baby who will be 21 in a few weeks. His tears have stopped, but he continues to look at Alexis, occasionally stroking her face or her hair, until the ambulance pulls into the bay at the hospital and the doctors and nurses take over. Castle's resources ensure that Alexis will have a private room; for saftey reasons, two police officers will be stationed outside as long as she's there. It's still early evening but dark, and Beckett and Castle wait in the low-lit room, quietly discussing the afternoon in Staten Island, and what will happen now. A doctor comes in to tell them that he has flushed out the sedative that Tyson had administered to knock out Alexis, that physically she is in remarkably good shape.

"Is she awake?" Castle asks.

"No, but she will be shortly. As soon as she is and we've checked a few things we'll bring her up."

"May I go down and wait with her? It's really important that I be there when she opens her eyes. Please."

"Yes. I've been given a little background, confidentially of course. Would you like to come with me?"

"Thank you, yes. Kate?"

She shakes her head and squeezes his hand. "You go. She should be the first person you see. I'll be here, and it will give me time to talk to Gates and the boys."

Even though both Tyson and Nieman are in custody, the most secure possible, Beckett and her colleagues continue to use the burner phones that Castle had supplied. She asks when the two will be arraigned and says that she'll be there. No way is she missing that. She's already thinking ahead to their trials. Beckett is opposed to capital punishment, but there are times when she thinks she's not. She lifts her head, sure that she hears Castle's voice.

The door opens. Alexis is on a gurney, awake, with her father clinging to the rail; two orderlies quickly transfer her to the bed.

"Hi, Kate," she says groggily, lifting her hand a few inches. "You found me."

Beckett moves over and kisses Alexis on the forehead. "No way your dad would rest until he did."

"I meant you. He told me. It was you."

TBC

**A/N** Thank you for all the support. One chapter to go to wrap up this saga.


	18. Chapter 18

**Disclaimer:** The only part of _Castle_ that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

It's 6:30 in the morning, not quite sunrise on a chilly November day, but it's light enough for Kate Beckett as she runs along the Hudson River north of Battery Park. She's mentally planning a Thanksgiving menu, the first Thanksgiving since Alexis had been rescued and come home. They've survived a raft of holidays, among them Easter (ignored, except for some tiny chocolate eggs), Mother's Day (a disaster), Father's Day (highly emotional), and Hallowe'en. The last was a couple of weeks ago, and had gone pretty well. They'd limited decorations in the loft to some friendly paper ghosts and a smiling jack-o'-lantern, which Alexis had helped carve. "You have to, Pumpkin," Castle had said. "It's a nickname requirement."

One holiday—not a holiday, but an important day, ordinarily a family holiday—that they neither celebrated nor acknowledged was Alexis's birthday. She turned twenty-one only a few weeks after getting home, and just days before that they learned that the date had been 3XK's objective. Two years earlier, when he had framed Castle for the murder of Tessa Horton and had hacked into all his accounts, Tyson had found that on her twenty-first birthday Alexis would have access to a multi-million dollar trust fund that her father had established for her. He began to put a plan into motion almost as soon as he survived the fall from the bridge. He and Kelly Nieman rounded up Maureen and then seized Alexis. After Maureen had plastic surgery, and after Tyson was sure that she could successfully pass herself off as Castle's daughter, he put her in play. Through Maureen, he would take control of the trust fund, transfer it to an untraceable account, and then kill both her and Alexis. And then he would disappear. He wouldn't need to torment Castle any more, because he'd have destroyed him.

Beckett had interrogated Tyson briefly, before he lawyered up. Castle hadn't been in the room, hadn't even been allowed on the other side of the glass. No one was going to risk that and Castle, after considerable pressure from Beckett, had agreed. Instead, he had watched remotely, and in pain.

"What kind of pathetic father doesn't know his own kid?" Tyson had said, looking straight into the camera.

"I never thought I'd agree with him about anything," Castle had said to her at home that night. "But he's right. What kind of a father was I? Am I?" The two of them had gone over this even before they'd found Alexis, and for months afterwards. It's only now, when his daughter is finally finding solid ground, that he is easing up on himself.

They had uncovered the details of Tyson's plan from information in the Staten Island house, and from Kelly Nieman. Once she saw the interrogation video in which Tyson dismissed her as "a useless fucking bitch," she was desperate to save her own skin and to do whatever she could to put him on death row. She made a deal that would keep her off it, even though she'd spend the rest of her life in prison. After many consultations, Maureen had gone into witness protection. They don't care where she is. Tyson is awaiting trial. Beckett wonders if he'll ever make a deal.

While Alexis was still in the hospital, she assured her family that Tyson had never laid a hand on her: no physical torture, no sexual assault. In the early weeks, it was the only thing they had to hang on to: there were days when she didn't speak at all, and ones where she didn't stop. She told them that while she was a captive sometimes she thought that she'd die of fright, and sometimes of boredom. Tyson let her read any book and listen to any music that she wanted, but that was it. No TV, no radio, no internet, no newspapers, magazine, or movies. And no going outside, except every night, for an hour. He was armed; she knew better than to try to call for help or to run. She had no idea what he had in store for her, why he kept her alive and well. "I just kept thinking you'd find me," she said. "That's all I had."

Nine months, that's how long it's been since Alexis came home. Not unlike a human gestation period, Beckett thinks. The first three months were full of nausea, vomiting, anxiety. The second trimester had none, or almost none, of the happiness of actual pregnancy, but it had things to cheer, and milestones marked. Appetite: regained; fears and nightmares: a long way from eliminated, but definitely reduced. In the final trimester, there has been real progress. There's no bundle of joy at the end, but there are expectations, manageable expectations. Alexis had gone back to Columbia in September; she's taking only two courses as she realigns herself, remakes her life. She's not ready for a dorm yet, but they had found a studio apartment near home for her to try, and she has stayed there several nights. Studies there, quite often. Sometimes she starts to sleep there but can't make it, comes back to Broome Street during the night. Beckett always hears her. The first time she'd gotten out of bed to talk to her, but Alexis seemed chagrined, so she left it at a hug.

Her feet are pounding in the runner's lane that skirts the river. Comparing Alexis's post-release ordeal to a pregnancy pushes her her mind to her unwritten list of reasons she hates Jerry Tyson. She'd wanted to get pregnant last spring—try to, anyway—and then Hell had descended on them. There was no way she would even dream of a baby while Alexis was in the state she'd been in—not to mention Castle's emotional condition. Their sex life had all but vanished for the first four months, except for occasional bouts of angry sex. Not anger taken out on her, never, but it was sex with a raging Castle. It was combustible, a roiling blend of anger and grief and passion, and it always happened when she wasn't expecting it. Sometimes he would wake her up, asking both permission and unnecessary forgiveness with his eyes; once after his almost violent orgasm he put his head between her breasts and wept inconsolably. One evening he grabbed her by the wrist as she was walking by his desk and they ended up knocking over two lamps, a chair, a wastebasket, and almost everything on his desk. She was embarrassed by the excitement that she had experienced then; she didn't want to talk to Castle about it, but she forced herself discuss it with Burke. "There's no shame in it, Kate," he said, calmly and reasonably.

Thank God for Burke. Initially the person he helped most was Alexis, but eventually she moved to another therapist who was a close friend of his. The young woman began to feel uncomfortable seeing the same psychiatrist as her father and stepmother. Beckett had offered to go to someone else, but Alexis had insisted, and so had Burke. Martha was the only one who didn't get professional help. "I'm probably the only actor in New York who hasn't done time with a shrink, darling," she said. "Call me crazy, but I'm not going to start now. I'll get through this with all of you, and on my own." And she has. The woman is made of tungsten.

Unlike me, Beckett thinks as she stops for a moment, ready to make the turn for home. The sun is just high enough now to come through the bare branches of the trees and just strong enough to penetrate the cloud cover, make the water sparkle a little. She shakes her head and begins to run again. She still breaks down, still has crying jags that almost choke her. She hides them from Castle, though she knows she shouldn't. She's getting close to home when she makes a resolution. No more crying on her own. She'd like to promise herself no more crying at all, but that's another step.

She's two blocks away, and spent. It's Sunday morning, and she stops in their favorite bakery for what Castle calls A Box Of Everything—croissants, eclairs, tiny fruit tarts, almond cakes, brioches. When she comes through the door she sees him in the kitchen, making coffee. His back is to her, and he hasn't heard her. She tiptoes up to him, put her arms around him and kisses him between the shoulder blades. When she reaches around to drop the box of pastries on the counter, she sees a list.

"What's that, Castle?"

"Shopping list. For Thanksgiving."

"Funny, I was making one in my head while I was running."

"You were?" he turns around and draws her in for a hug.

"Yeah, I was."

Fifteen minutes later, while they're starting a second cup of coffee and Castle is chasing flakes of croissant around his plate, Beckett's phone rings. "It's Gates," she says, and moves to the living room. He watches her while she's listening to the captain. Her face is impassive; the shifts in her body are tiny, but monumental. She looks as though she's simultaneously tensing up and releasing tension. He's never seen anything like it. Yes, he has. Once. The day they took down Bracken. It was just like that.

"Thank you, sir. Yes, I will. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye."

She's standing, facing him, holding her arms slightly away from her sides. The phone has slipped on to the floor. Her eyes are full of tears.

He runs, and takes her by the elbows.

"What's wrong? Kate? What's wrong?"

"Word got around the prison that Tyson had kidnapped a nine-old girl and held her captive in his house for more than a year."

"But Alexis was nineteen."

"I know. But the story was that he took a nine-year-old. Not nineteen, _nine_. They thought he was a short eyes, Castle. A pedophile. Lowest of the low in prison."

"And?"

"Somehow someone got to him. They shivved him. He's dead."

The room has never been quieter or noisier. The air around them is electric. She throws herself against him and they lock on to each other.

"It's over," she says. "It's over. It's over."

He buries his face in her hair. "And now we can begin."

**A/N** Enormous thanks to everyone who stuck with me on this.


End file.
